Forest-Web-3.0

Context

Forests are vital for sustaining life on earth. They harbour most of the terrestrial biodiversity and play a major role in buffering climate change impacts. Protecting forests and assessing and monitoring biodiversity are therefore extremely important for mitigating the dual climate and biodiversity crisis (IPCC & IPBES) and contribute to key targets of international policy frameworks, including the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, and more recently the Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership (FCLP). To effectively meet these targets, scientists increasingly require findable and accessible ecological data necessary for addressing priority questions important for society. However, despite forests being one of the most intensively studied habitats on the planet, current database initiatives on forest biodiversity have significant gaps. Moreover, within the realms of open science (i.e. transparency at all stages of the research process) extant primary ecological data are often difficult to find.

Main objectives

Through Forest-Web-3.0, biodiversity research data will become increasingly discoverable and its reach and potential impact will extend across a wider variety of end users, in particular stakeholders engaged in forest conservation. Furthermore, the project aims to showcase the potential economic value of biodiversity data. Leveraging Web-3 technologies and digital twins of forest ecosystems, Forest-Web-3.0 will evidence a novel requisite paradigm, one where economies tied to resource extraction (deforestation) can be balanced with economies tied to resource preservation (proforestation), offering financially feasible alternatives towards safeguarding forests and, in-turn, driving systematic and sustainable commitments to nature protection.

Main activities

Forest-Web-3.0 will spearhead a shift among academics from biological data curation to data stewardship, mobilising FAIR forest biodiversity and environmental data by utilising blockchain architecture in the design and implementation of a distributed and decentralised ecological data network.

We will also use mobilised data resources in concert with earth observation data to validate and improve the ecological realism of forest digital twin models, which are designed to capture ecosystem integrity and used to evidence and execute nature-based economies within a Web-3.0 regenerative finance ecosystem.

Through this pairing of mobilised data and enhanced digital twin models, and in concert with the growing voluntary biodiversity credit market, we will communicate to forest land-owners economic incentives for preserving high- integrity forests. The ambition here is to generate an understanding and favouring of revenues tied to proforestation and, in turn, mobilise new actors towards safeguarding and stewarding biodiversity.