During the first phase of research, from 1 May 2020 to 31 October 2022, the Smart Forests team included 5 postdoctoral fellows, 3 research assistants, 1 project administrator, and 6 collaborator consultants.
The team undertook initial data collection by surveying the sites, initiatives, and practitioners relevant to smart forest technology developments. This included literature reviews and document analysis of at least 250 related texts, the identification of at least 200 projects, infrastructures, and practitioners for further review and exchange, and the initial undertaking of 40 interviews with a wide range of stakeholders working in this emerging field. While travel was greatly restricted during RP1 due to Covid, the team undertook pilot fieldwork and testing of smart forests technology in locations including the UK, EU, and India.
In addition to addressing core project objectives through a review of the field, the team set up the overall project research infrastructure to meet data management requirements and to share and analyze project materials within the team. A core part of the research infrastructure is the Smart Forests Atlas [https://atlas.smartforests.net] which the team developed by working with collaborator consultants to build an open-data research platform and infrastructure for collating, synthesizing, and sharing project data.
The Smart Forests team undertook a number of dissemination activities in the form of talks and conference presentations on forests and digital technologies. The project also held its first symposium, The Forest Multiple [https://smartforests.net/the-forest-multiple] at the University of Cambridge. Podcasts from this event are in the process of being published on the Smart Forests Atlas 'Radio' channel (also available on all major podcast providers). The symposium is the topic for a special issue now in preparation. The team published co-authored and single-authored journal articles, blog posts, lexicon and glossary entries, handbook contributions, interviews, and book chapters, so as to distribute research in the broadest possible range of formats during project start-up.
