One of Autonomous Forest’s first initiatives should be to conduct a ecological inventory of all forest areas currently under the association’s stewardship. This assessment will encompass the identification and cataloging of tree and plant species, the evaluation of vegetation density and distribution patterns, and the delineation of distinct ecological zones within the forest parcels. All data collected should be digitized and made readily accessible to members through a Autonomous Forests own digital infastructure. This systematic approach will yield a more granular grounded understanding of the forest’s ecological composition, providing a robust foundation for informed decisions and long-term management strategies.
Specification:
A group of 5-15 people could participate in this. The plan for now would be to organize Transport from Berlin to Reesdorf and spend around 6-7 hours there. People who are interested in this should beforehand discuss an approach to mapping and classification and communicate before with the developers to find solution of mapping the data.
Costs:
~0.5 ETH should be more than enough. The Verein would need invoices for everything anyhow so this will go into the annual financial statement in 2026.
this is not a final proposal so feel free to propose chances
I would love to join in this field trip!
This sounds really exciting, but i am currently not sure how the mapping/classification could be done. Will have a look into this!
Or maybe someone else already has an idea?(:
And how about planning the trip for the first weekend in may?
I think its a great idea and would be happy to discuss it further/vote on it. I also agree with Fr ida, that decision about the mapping method is important. I also have questions arising like:
how costs are planned, chosen methodology has an effect on costs?
how many people would be needed to show interest to make the proposal?
there are currently 11 people who staked, is that enough? is there a threshold?
also, if there are not enough people interested in this first proposal, could there be sth done to raise engagement (in a natural way) in the DAO participation do you think, to avoid apathy? (some technical stuff as well, like how to get news, participation involvement possibilities, etc, apart from coming into the forum) (I have just realized now that i need to set the forum thread to “watching” to be notified, hence my late answer)
I must admit I’m checking the bot cam pics almost daily, mostly when I wake up. So if that’s engagement, there it is. I have also staked, I have been excited about this project for a long time. The field trip sounds like a great idea. I’m an artist and part of my practice is investigating the experience of space, environment, and in particular natural landscape. Personally, I would, besides the obvious more scientific inquiry into the forest, also support mapping the landscape in a subjective manner, an animist approach. Rather than only viewing the landscape as a passive resource, treat it as an active relational being with whom you can communicate. Not only how to govern (as a DAO), but also connecting with the Genius Loci, honoring, listening to, and negotiating with the spirits of the place to form agreements and co-create intentions. Anyway, I’m happy to be a part of this and to think about what it could mean.
Took me a while to read about mapping methodologys. So here here is my proposal for the methodology, which is pretty amateurish:
I would propose a two-stage “methodology” that combines participatory assessment and expert validation (using an app to identify certain species), specifically designed to precede systematic grid-based surveys.
The fundamental idea is that species identification accuracy improves when surveyors first familiarize themselves with the actual species present in their specific site. This exploratory survey serves as a necessity for building a site-specific reference collection. Participants move through the study area recording all distinct plants through standardized photography protocols, effectively creating a visual collection. This photographic documentation serves multiple purposes: it enables later verification by expert systems and it creates training materials specific to this specific forest.
The first day would focus on thorough “floristic inventory using stratified opportunistic sampling”. Rather than following the grid system, teams would ensure representation across all visible habitat types and vegetation structures within the forest. In practice this means people walk through the forest taking photos of every interesting plant they see, making sure to cover different areas like dense patches, open areas, wet spots, and so on. Participants would us a selfhosted app to upload photos. The data would all be piped into a database running on our backend. We would then run all of the photos through an expert learning system identifying all plants in the photos and generating a forest plant database.
For the second day we would shift to systematic sampling using the established grid. Teams would select a subset of representative plots, perhaps fifteen to twenty of the total plots, chosen to capture the different vegetation types noticed during day one. In each selected plot, participants would conduct a species inventory recording all species present using the species list generated from day one. For each species found, they would estimate “abundance” using a simplified Braun-Blanquet scale: Rare for one to two individuals, Occasional for a few scattered plants, etc .This would combines the broad coverage from day one with quantitative data from day two, giving you both a complete species list and actual abundance data that can be used to classify vegetation zones.
When we have all this data we could have a nice visualization on the map we have allready. The cool thing i’m kinda excited about is that it would add a lot of data to the nft plots as they would get even more character.
As i said this is really just a proposal (and probally fairly standart ecological pratice) and i’m really interested to hear other mapping approaches which are more subjective. Also how could we integrate something like “listening to, and negotiating with the spirits of the place to form agreements and co-create intention” into this? (Btw big fan of you work @misha :).
