Digital Dimensions of Nature Recovery Conference

Diverse digital technologies—from artificial intelligence and social media to satellite sensing and mapping applications—are touted as potential solutions to overlapping crises of the 21st century, including the environmental and biodiversity crises, and the pressing challenge of nature recovery.

Nature recovery practitioners, alongside researchers from across the natural and social sciences, often widely and creatively deploy digital technologies and devices to monitor, model, and forecast environmental change, embracing the promise of the digital for managing and governing nature. Simultaneously, researchers continue to both utilise and critically examine the power of digital media as a means to understand, and generate, representations of nature, while developing critical approaches to the study of digital technologies and their relationship to nature recovery.

By bringing together those who actively engage with, and apply, digital solutions to environmental issues with those who emphasise the complex and potentially problematic considerations of these same tools, there is potential to create and catalyse constructive, and dynamic, new ways of thinking through the role of digital approaches to nature recovery. This two-day conference aims to unite interdisciplinary researchers across the University, and internationally, with a community of practitioners and policymakers, to critically explore the digital dimensions of nature recovery through a simultaneously conceptual and applied lens.

Leveraging the Digital Ecologies research group’s embeddedness within UK nature recovery communities, organisations, and initiatives, this conference is designed to create space for a wide range of voices, highlighting the complex and potentially problematic implications of digital tools, while exploring opportunities for pragmatic and actionable suggestions for decision-makers. We hope this conference will facilitate knowledge exchange, and explore the co-production of innovative solutions for nature recovery through a digital lens, while supporting new connections and discussions between a diverse range of academics, policymakers and practitioners.