The Forest Multiple: Composing and digitalizing wooded worlds

Designations of forests take hold in policy definitions, land use practices, community initiatives, scientific research, and entrepreneurial endeavors. These multiple forests form as distinct and often competing realities enacted through environmental practices, knowledges, and cosmologies. “The Forest Multiple” special issue explores the question of “what is a forest” to examine the diverse ways that forests materialize and are operationalized in a time of planetary upheaval. With ongoing deforestation and degradation, together with calls for restoration and replanting, forests are positioned as key ecosystems for addressing climate change and biodiversity collapse. Technologies, especially digital tools, are often central to forest restoration and conservation projects, further entrenching distinct logics of datafication, optimization, and efficiency typically oriented toward market objectives, which can collide with diversely inhabited forest forests. In this sense, conserved, cultivated, and expanded forests can vary in composition, purpose, interconnections, and social–cultural value. This special issue revisits and extends key work on multiplicity and pluralism within science and technology studies, geography, and aligned fields to analyze how forests as ecosystems and entities are made, what the consequences of these practices are, how forest worlds come into conflict, and how it could be possible to work toward more just, convivial, and pluralistic environmental relations.