Short abstract:

The IEFC was developed in the 1980s as a response to the timber-oriented forest inventories of the Franco era. The Catalan government used the IEFC to promote regional autonomy, and the making of the database was embedded in a wave of post-dictatorship Catalan techno-nationalism.

Long abstract:

The Ecological and Forestry Inventory of Catalonia (IEFC) was the flagship project of the newly founded Ecological and Forestry Applications Research Centre (CREAF) in Barcelona. It was Catalunya’s first ecological forest inventory, led by ecologists who saw themselves as critically responding to the productivist forest engineering that characterized forest policy throughout Franco’s dictatorship. CREAF was founded upon the values of a socially responsible, democratic science of ecology, and was part of the new Catalan nationalism. The IEFC fed from “new ecologic data” of forests beyond timber and was designed to track the effect of climate change on European forests. The Catalan government used the IEFC to promote Catalan science as a European science, bypassing the Spanish state. The ecologists, in their association with the Institute for Catalan Studies, saw the new mapping as contributing to the conservation of Catalan culture at large: language and forest function together as one. Based on archival documentation and a nascent oral history collection, this paper tells the story of the rise of terrestrial ecology and the technical and political difficulties of making the IEFC database: putting it together, making it useful, and integrating it with Spanish databases. By interviewing not only the leading scientists who participated in the ideological moulding of the IEFC, but by including the voices of technicians, secretaries, and forest rangers who participated in the project, I hope to shed some light on how a diverse array of actors articulated (or didn’t) the new wave of post-dictatorship Catalan techno-nationalism.