Mobilising, harmonising and incentivising forest biodiversity and environmental monitoring data through Web 3.0 technology.

Forests are vital for sustaining life on earth. They harbour the majority of terrestrial biodiversity and play a major role in buffering climate change impacts. Protection of forests and assessment and monitoring of biodiversity are therefore extremely important for mitigating the dual climate and biodiversity crisis (IPCC & IPBES) and contribute 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 across 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. 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 drive systematic and sustainable commitments to nature protection.

With a focus on the forest biome, Forest-Web.3.0 aims to showcase the utility and uptake potential of Web-3.0 technologies in ecology on two fronts. In accordance with the Biodiversa+ call "Improved transnational monitoring of biodiversity and ecosystem change for science and society" and the call theme “Innovation and harmonisation of methods and tools for collection and management of biodiversity monitoring data” we first aim for a new paradigm in ecological data curation, governance and sharing, leveraging blockchain architecture to incentivise active data stewardship and facilitate widespread mobilisation of extant low-velocity biodiversity and environmental data. Second, and in accordance with the call theme “Making use of available biodiversity monitoring data” we utilise mobilised data resources in concert with earth observation data to validate and improve upon the ecological realism of forest digital twin models, designed to capture ecosystem integrity and used to evidence and execute nature-based economies within a Web-3.0 regenerative finance ecosystem. Through these enhanced digital twin models and in concert with the exponentially growing voluntary biodiversity market we will evidence to a trans-national network of stakeholders (forest land-owners) economic incentives for preserving high-integrity forests. The ambition here is to generate trans-national inertia in understanding and favouring revenues tied to resource preservation (proforestation), mobilise new actors towards safeguarding and stewarding biodiversity, and ultimately drive systematic and sustainable commitments to nature protection.