In British Columbia, Canada, aging forestry scientists struggle to pass on long-term projects to younger colleagues who may never arrive. Thanks to the government of British Columbia's radical downsizing of its forestry research institutions, many of these scientists have been forced to reconceptualize the meaning of “succession.” Central to this process are computer-based simulations of forest change, which have become critical sites of relationality for scientists struggling to sustain key experiments and their attending intellectual legacies. Digital simulations have increasingly come to mediate the expectations and shared dependencies that constitute scientific authorship. As a result, contemporary processes of institutional reproduction can depend less on deliberate enactments of agency than on subtler processes of detachment. To have their epistemic authority recognized by funders, apprentices, and collaborators, aging scientists must increasingly foreground their vulnerabilities and prepare for the possibility of their own erasure. [expertise, aging, simulation, forestry, environmental science, British Columbia, Canada, North America]

中文翻译：

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数字化老化

在加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省，年迈的林业科学家努力将长期项目传递给可能永远不会到达的年轻同事。由于不列颠哥伦比亚省政府大幅缩减林业研究机构的规模，许多科学家被迫重新定义“继承”的含义。这一过程的核心是基于计算机的森林变化模拟，对于努力维持关键实验及其相关知识遗产的科学家来说，森林变化已成为关系的关键场所。数字模拟越来越多地调解构成科学作者身份的期望和共享依赖关系。因此，当代制度再生产的过程可以更少地依赖于代理的有​​意制定，而是依赖于更微妙的超脱过程。为了让资助者、学徒和合作者承认他们的认知权威，老年科学家必须越来越突出他们的脆弱性，并为他们自己被抹去的可能性做好准备。[专业知识、老化、模拟、林业、环境科学、不列颠哥伦比亚省、加拿大、北美]