From Amazon to Amazon with Trouble: Data Infrastructure for an Instrumented Forest

• In Event: Data Worldings and Post/colonial Connectedness II

Abstract

This text discusses the current endeavors for developing a data infrastructure for a major environmental experiment in the Brazilian Amazon forest, named Amazon-FACE (Free-Air CO2 Enrichment). An international scientific initiative for assessing the effects of increased atmospheric CO2 on the ecology and resilience of the Amazon forest. In short, it’s an open laboratory, 20km north of Manaus City, for simulating an atmosphere from the future by pulverizing CO2 through 30m in height pipes for 20 years in 9m radius “experimental sites” in the middle of the forest. It’s expected that the experimental data produced can better inform prediction models for the Amazon future. For this to work as intended, as a data-sharing fiction across the many disciplines and institutions involved, the data infrastructure needed storage, connectedness and price only the dominant narrative of “high performant, scalable and invisible Cloud”, like Amazon (the company), could provide. Except for a small legislation detail from Brazil, stating that all original data collected in Brazil must remain in data centers in Brazil, even though copies could live in foreign countries. By foregrounding the otherwise invisible work of data infrastructure, this localized event helps us understand the ontological problem of how climate change issues become intertwined with data issues, and how one is constantly absorbed by the other. And by a series of interviews and observations I show how this assemblage enacts different inside/outside relations at every different location, be it on the laboratory, the database, the country or the forest.

Authors

• Felipe Mammoli Andrade, UNICAMP

• Marko Monteiro, State University of Campinas