PI: Ash Eliza Smith (University of Georgia)

What Is a Forest? is an arts-based research project exploring how forests are sensed, modeled, and understood across living and nonliving systems around Atlanta. It investigates the “stack” of the Atlanta forest—soil, clay, roots, fungi, trees, canopy, birds, sensors, archives, and AI datasets—to ask: What counts as a forest and what is recorded? The project is grounded in Atlanta’s ecological and infrastructural landscape, where forests and multispecies, more-than-human presences intersect with environmental datasets and emerging AI research.

It examines how AI-assisted models such as canopy classifiers, heat maps, species-detection systems, and archival digitization pipelines can translate forests into data. Through field observations and interviews with scientists, artists, and community members, it considers how human choices shape what becomes legible to AI and how data-justice issues arise when life-forms remain uncounted.