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Digital technologies are increasingly being positioned as central to addressing grand societal challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss, particularly in relation to the management and protection of natural environments. Previous Information Systems (IS) research has however largely focused on artificial objects and organisational settings, leaving the phenomenon of digitalising natural environments underexplored. Understanding how sociotechnical interactions shape this process is therefore both opportune and necessary. In this dissertation, I develop a sensitising device comprising the object of digitalisation, data, and digital representations to examine and understand this distinct phenomenon. Drawing on both qualitative and design science research situated in Swedish forestry, this study investigates how this digitalisation process unfolds.

In doing so, thesis shows that the digitalisation of natural environments is a deeply sociotechnical process shaped by the distinct characteristics of natural objects and the competing interests of multiple stakeholders, which actively influence what can be captured as data and digitally represented. Where multiple perspectives on data coexist within the same digitalisation effort, the perspective that dominates shapes the trajectory and outcomes of the process. Achieving a more comprehensive digitalisation of natural environments therefore requires moving from purely commodity-oriented views of data towards more relational perspectives.

Taken together, this thesis makes novel contributions to IS research and practice. Theoretically, it extends scholarly attention beyond artificial objects to natural environments as a distinct object of study, and enriches existing concepts of digitalisation, digital transformation, and digital innovation through a novel empirical context. It also develops and applies a sensitising device that provides an analytical lens for studying how this process unfolds in practice. For practitioners, the thesis offers implications for how managers can adopt pluralistic perspectives on data in digitalisation efforts, how policy and public investment can support more inclusive digital systems, and how diverse actors can be brought together to foster participatory planning of natural environments.