This article focuses on monitoring and tracking seabirds from the mid-twentieth century to the present. It illustrates how seabirds have been reconfigured as environmental sentinels through their enrolment in scientific networks aiming to understand birds and to monitor changing marine environments. Drawing on historical and geographical literatures exploring changes in environmental monitoring, ocean science, and ornithology over the latter half of the twentieth century, the article outlines three ways in which seabirds have been enrolled in scientific projects — as populations, samplers, and digital animals. It attends to the development of seabird monitoring programmes from the 1960s, enabled partly by European occupation of remote territories in the Southern Ocean. It then shows how seabird scientists positioned data collected through these programmes as contributing to knowledge about an increasingly turbulent, depleted sea. Finally, it explores how this idea was reconfigured in the 1990s through new bird-borne sensors, creating novel connections between the science and politics of the ocean as a physical space and lively ecology. Through this case, the paper advances conversations concerning the shifting character of environmental sensing and science in the Anthropocene and contributes to the development of technonatural history as a theory and method in geographical research.

Large-scale marine protected areas (LSMPAs) are growing in prominence as an area-based conservation strategy that places vast areas of the ocean (more than 150,000 square kilometres at a time) into formal protection. While LSMPAs are lauded for their conservation potential—for example, their ability to protect entire marine habitats and the ranges of highly mobile marine species—they also fulfil other political, social and economic functions. This chapter considers the role of imagination in the oceanic bordering practices of LSMPA designation. It demonstrates how LSMPAs are mobilised as resources by powerful actors to promote visions of progress tied to national identities centred on continuing connection to the ocean. In doing so, it illustrates how there is more at stake in the establishment of LSMPAs than conservation and marine management alone. The oceanic bordering agendas associated with LSMPAs not only redraw ocean maps, but also reinforce and renew national identities in relation to ocean space.

Engaging with microbial worlds challenges the ocular and audio centrism of conventional social science methods. It is not possible to see or hear individual microbes in the same ways in which we would sense other humans or nonhumans; rather, we see and sense their effects as patches of mold or distinctive odors. Our bodies might register microbial presence/absence as, for example, the symptoms of infection, a novel taste profile, or a digestive disorder. In this chapter, we reflect on three recent projects which sought to experiment with new ways of making microbes sensible. The first of these—participatory metagenomics—drew on the tools of next-generation sequencing as a means through which households could become attuned to—and experiment with—their domestic microbiome. The second used body-mapping with family groups to explore their collective knowledge of microbial presences and absences in human bodies. The third examined how practices of fermentation can sensitize us to the ways in which humans and microbes shape each other through cooking and eating. In each case, we draw attention to how these methods offer unique insights into what might be retained, and what might be lost, as we attempt to translate what we might know/sense about microbial worlds through practices of sequencing, mapping, and experimentation, into shared images, diagrams, maps, and understandings. Three key themes emerge from our analysis where our approach resonates with (but at times also finds itself in tension with) a non-representational methodological disposition: a foregrounding of sensual knowledges, an emphasis on experimentation and play, and a commitment to leaving the future open. At the same time, other sensibilities—in particular a commitment to co-productive, participatory research—also emerge as significant, with the potential for further expanding the scope of non-representational approaches.

Electronic monitoring systems (EM, sometimes known as remote electronic monitoring or REM) have been put forward since the 1990s as a promising solution to fisheries monitoring and data collection challenges. These systems, which produce, store, and in some cases transmit video, location, and sensor data, allow fisheries managers to remotely ‘see’ the activities of individual fishing vessels and entire fleets. Governmental, non-governmental, and corporate actors are rallying behind EM as a key tool for achieving sustainable fisheries, touting their benefits over existing fisheries monitoring approaches using logbooks and human observers. A sizable gap exists, however, between the discursive prominence of EM in fisheries governance fora and operational realities. In the global fishing fleet, coverage by EM systems is a drop in the ocean. Like other private sector-led environmental interventions, EM derives its allure from promises of effectiveness, efficiency, transparency, and scalability in service of a more desirable future, even as it faces myriad implementation challenges in the present. In this presentation, I critically assess the promise and functioning of electronic monitoring systems, with particular attention to the monitoring of seabird bycatch in fisheries. Drawing on interviews with marine ecologists, fisheries policy experts, and technology providers, and document analysis of published research and technical reports, I outline the tensions and obstacles facing EM at three key stages: upstream of implementation, on-board fishing vessels, and downstream data analysis. Although promoted as technologies of transparency, I show how this transparency is selective: at each stage, various interventions aim to maintain business-as-usual. Rather than argue for a more powerful, top-down model to overcome this selectiveness, the presentation makes the case for understanding the failures of EM in the context of wider relations of power and knowledge in fisheries governance and challenges transparency as a necessarily ‘good’ normative ambition for ocean governance.

In 2021 and 2022, we engaged in a collaborative filmmaking project at Maple Farm, a rewilding site in Southeast England. The project resulted in After Wilding, a speculative documentary film that explores different perspectives on rewilding and the future of Maple Farm and natures in the United Kingdom more broadly. After Wilding envisions what it would be like to visit Maple Farm in June 2042; to do so, we used 360° imagery of the present site and computer-generated visualisations of possible future landscape features. These visualisations were underscored by three narrative vignettes reflecting on different interventions and perspectives on the site. This article describes creating After Wilding as a three-part process – attunement, perspectives and synthesis. We then reflect on the potential opportunities that digital technologies offer for collaborative speculations between researchers, artists and practitioners for geographical praxis and conservation activities.

Digital mediation profoundly shapes how cultural geographers understand and encounter nature. Practice-based engagements with digitally mediated natures pose methodological, aesthetic and ethical questions for cultural geographers. Reflecting on a conference held in Bonn, Germany, in July 2022, which brought together a host of artists, practitioners, researchers and designers working at the human-technology-nature interface, this paper introduces the special issue, Digital Ecologies in Practice. The paper reflects on the key themes which cut across contributing articles and sketches a framework for methodologically – and practice – inclined geographers. Specifically, we draw out the ways in which practice-based engagements with digital technologies and processes of digitisation afford novel modes of sensing, speculating and remediating natures that have implications for the doing of both digital ecologies and cultural geographies as fields of research and domains of critical practice.

Large-scale marine protected areas (LSMPAs) are an increasingly important feature of global conservation as countries strive to meet international commitments to protect 30% of all land and sea areas by 2030. In this paper, we contribute to current interest in the imaginaries that underpin environmental governance. Drawing together work on spatial and sociotechnical imaginaries, we examine how ocean imaginaries get bound up with the rise of large, protected areas in the ocean. We develop a typology of three ocean imaginaries associated with LSMPAs, which is elaborated through an empirical analysis of the political discourse that surrounded the designation of 17 LSMPAs since 2010. We examine extracts of government statements, speeches and press releases predominantly in news article sources and government websites to consider how these ocean imaginaries are institutionally stabilised and aligned with advances in science and technology. Our analysis reinforces an understanding that the kinds of spatial imaginaries that are created for environmental governance shape and are shaped by policy and management strategies. We also find that both visions of ocean spaces and the social worlds that perceive them can be multiple. We contend that research and policy need to recognise LSMPAs and other area-based conservation measures as more-than-technical pursuits, and harness geographic scholarship to consider and enable a multiplicity of imaginaries in exploring options for environmental governance.

This chapter interrogates the political and ecological implications of digital transformations in ocean governance through a case study of on-bird fisheries surveillance using albatrosses. We bring together digital and more-than-human geographies, political ecology, and science and technology studies to critically assess an emerging model of ocean governance exemplified through this case. Our account is attentive to the lively agencies of technologies, animals, and oceanic volumes, as well as to the power structures governing these more-than-human assemblages. We first outline a new wet ontology of the ocean and its attendant modes of governance. Second, we consider the risks presented by these governance approaches to the animals they enrol. Lastly, we interrogate how these approaches naturalise surveillance as a solution to marine ecological issues. In conclusion, we reflect on the potential for digital ecologies research to address these new data-driven and animal-borne approaches to marine science and governance, and to offer cross-disciplinary understandings of these novel forms of governance as they emerge.