Paper short abstract:

My aim is to explore how the environmental data generated by the digital restoration platforms Lemu and Restor is influencing the environmental conservation landscape in Chile, with a focus on Chilean Patagonia.

Paper long abstract:

Digital restoration platforms have gained increasing traction as crucial tools for environmental governance and climate change mitigation. Despite their importance in addressing environmental issues, the academic literature on how these technologies are changing local ecosystems is still scant. This lack of empirical evidence is even more prominent in countries from the Global South such as Chile, which has a history of neoliberal conservation undertaken by non-governmental actors, while in recent years, different digital platforms are further reconstituting its conservation and restoration practices.

Here, two restoration platforms are worth mentioning: Lemu and Restor. The former is a restoration platform app developed by a Chilean start-up with the same name, which besides providing different affordances (multi-data layers, 3D models, and key ecosystem and biodiversity data), it also gives the opportunity to its users to provide financial support to different environmental initiatives. The latter is a non-profit environmental platform which has been co-developed by ETH Zurich and Google in order to enhance transparency and connectivity for conservation initiatives worldwide, as well as displaying different conservation projects which are willing to receive monetary donations.

Building on the literature of political ecology, digital sociology, and STS, my aim is to explore how the environmental data generated by these digital platforms is influencing the environmental conservation landscape in Chile, with a focus on Chilean Patagonia. By doing that, I want to inquire about how environmental data infrastructures are funded, who controls the generated data, and with what purposes that data is collected.