Research project The project explores creating a virtual forest representation for participatory forest planning, addressing the challenge of applying digital twins—common in artificial environments like factories—to natural settings like forests. By engaging multiple stakeholders, the project aims to understand how a digital twin can enhance forest management, increase participation, and provide actionable insights.
This project explores how to create a "digital twin" of the Swedish forest—a virtual model used to simulate and manage the real forest. Unlike industrial settings, forests are natural environments lacking direct digital control. The project aims to bridge this gap by involving diverse stakeholders in forest planning, using the digital twin to balance various needs and goals.
Project objectives
The project investigates the preconditions for creating and using a virtual representation of the forest in participatory forest planning processes. Most digital twin implementations are done in factories or industrial plants. These are artificial environments with interfaces that allowing for direct connections to manipulate the physical environment through manipulations of the digital twin. Forests, however, are natural environments, lacking such direct connections. The project therefore probes the potential forging of this connection through provided participatory forest planning processes. Here, multiple stakeholders use insights emanating from the virtual representation of the forest to negotiate various interests and priorities with regards to how the physical forest should be managed.
Background
A digital twin is a virtual representation of that provides facilities for measurement, simulation, analysis, and decision-making. A digital twin of the Swedish forest has potential to serve as a novel means for including a wide range of stakeholders to engage in forestry management policies and decisions. Enabling increased participation and input of diversity of groups, a such a digital twin may allow for greater consideration of the various needs, concerns, goals, and interests, involved, while also providing opportunities for the legitimacy of decisions that are made with regards to forestry management to be increased.
Research questions
Expected contributions
The project will generate an understanding for the preconditions for creating a digital twin of the forest which can next be generalized globally. While the project is based in Sweden, a digital twin of the forest can be also be useful in facilitating stakeholder dialogue in developing countries where deforestation posits a major threat. The results will provide insights to practitioners on how they can leverage digital technology in their dialogic processes and provide guidance to software developers for how to create digital twins that support participatory forest planning processes.
