The risks of open forest data exploitation are magnified by features of how forests are measured and who does the measuring. Generating long-term data on forest health and change involves physically measuring and identifying millions of trees. This means establishing, maintaining and revisiting plots, and curating records indefinitely. Trees are long-lived organisms so forests require decades of monitoring to properly infer change. Sustaining local observations for decades needs deep, long-term commitment to the unique but shifting combinations of people, institutions, regulations, interests and relationships that characterize each forest site. The challenge is enhanced by the great biodiversity of tropical forests. Measuring a single hectare of Amazon forest involves collecting and identifying up to ten times the number of tree species that are present in the UK’s entire 24 million hectares. There are very few people with the skills to do this.
Long-term tropical-forest data measurements not only require effort and skill but also often carry risk and depend on some of the most disadvantaged actors in the global science community. Many forest workers (researchers, technicians, students, field assistants and local communities) lack basic job security, much less a career path, despite the long-term dedication that monitoring forests requires. In addition, many tropical forest workers may endure dangerous field conditions, with threats including kidnapping, armed insurgents, narcotraffickers, land-grabbers, infectious disease, snakebite, floods, fire, dangerous transport and gender-based violence. Besides these personal dangers, tropical scientists often lack the basic resources to measure and maintain their forest plots, let alone develop their research groups8.
In contrast to the experiences of those monitoring forests on the ground, consider the context for satellite and aircraft-based measurements, which require ground-based data for validation. Space-based forest missions are expensive but are funded by public or private capital. Once in orbit, they stream data to analysts ‘for free’. This requires relatively few people to sustain, and although the analysts’ work is highly skilled, it carries little professional and physical risk and lacks commitment to place. Forest fieldwork is less capital-intensive, but needs sustained investment, is intensely human and carries substantial costs and risks. There are no automated collecting stations to help to identify and measure trees, so without the long-term dedication of many forest workers data collection simply stops.
The risks and costs involved in acquiring and sustaining ground forest data are persistently overlooked, ignored or regarded as externalities to be picked up by the forest workers themselves. This is especially problematic because countries that hold the most tropical forests are among those least able to invest in science and development (Fig. 1, Supplementary Fig. 1). For example, monitoring the carbon balance of intact tropical moist forests has been estimated to cost US $7 million a year12, easily exceeding present support. By contrast, the USA alone spends over $90 million annually on its national forest inventory13. So, many tropical forest data are collected by skilled people working with minimal funding, in challenging conditions and facing other constraints, including complex layers of rules, agreements and research permits. Given such huge disparities, it is hardly reasonable to expect this output to be served on an open plate to the world.
a,b, The 2008–2018 national average gross domestic product per capita (a) and tropical forest area per capita (b). Countries are coloured according to position from lowest (dark red) to highest (dark blue) within each global distribution.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the most vocal proponents of making tropical and subtropical forest data open are often not those who actually measure and monitor them. Meanwhile, key beneficiaries include powerful publishers (usually with commercial interests), agencies and technology companies (often with commercial or political interests), and highly educated computer-savvy analysts wishing to integrate earth observation data with forest data (naturally with a career interest). Relatively few of these institutions and people are based in the tropics and subtropics. Fewer still are also data originators.
And so, for many data originators the present meaning of making tropical forest data ‘open’ is to transfer the hard-won output of their labours to more privileged individuals and institutions, and lose more of the limited control they have over their professional lives. Power flows from the originators to public agencies, private companies and data scientists, mainly in the Global North.
Source: Ecology - nature.com
