From Policy to Practice: A Comparative Topic Modeling Study of Smart Forestry in China

The accelerated penetration of digital technology into natural ecosystems has led to the digital transformation of forest ecological spaces. Smart forestry, as a key pathway for digital-intelligence-enabled ecological governance, plays an important role in global sustainable development and multilevel governance. However, due to differences in functional positioning, resource capacity, and policy translation mechanisms, semantic shifts and disconnections arise between central policies, local policies, and practical implementation, thereby affecting policy execution and governance effectiveness. Fu-jian Province has been identified as a key pilot region for smart forestry practices in China, owing to its early adoption of informatization strategies and distinctive ecolog-ical conditions. This study employs the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic mod-eling method to construct a corpus of smart forestry texts, including central policies, local policies, and local media reports from 2010 to 2025. Seven potential themes are identified and categorized into three overarching dimensions: technological empow-erment, governance mechanisms, and ecological goals. The results show that central policies emphasize macro strategy and ecological security, local policies focus on plat-form construction and governance coordination, and local practice features digital in-novation and ecological value transformation. Three transmission paths are summa-rized to support smart forestry policy optimization and inform digital ecological gov-ernance globally.