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.

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 multi-level 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. Fujian 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 ecological conditions. This study employed the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling 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 were identified and categorized into three overarching dimensions: technological empowerment, governance mechanisms, and ecological goals. The results show that central policies emphasize macro strategy and ecological security, local policies focus on platform construction and governance coordination, and local practice features digital innovation and ecological value transformation. Three transmission paths are summarized to support smart forestry policy optimization and inform digital ecological governance globally.

In the face of the realistic background of population loss, resource constraints and factor constraints, it explores the high-quality development of forest areas, aiming to analyze the impacts of population exodus from forest areas on economic growth and high-quality development. The focus is on China’s key state-owned forest areas, especially in Heilongjiang Province, Jilin Province and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. A set of indicators centered on the concept of green development is constructed and designed to measure the dynamics of high-quality economic development and the impact of population outflow in the three provinces and regions from 2000 to 2022. The study found that (1) Heilongjiang Province excels in high-quality economic development, followed by Jilin Province, while the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region lags behind. During the observation period, the high-quality development trend in the forest areas showed a steady upward trend until 2014 and then began to slow down or even decline. (2) The pulling effect of population mobility on economic growth in forest areas has gradually weakened; nevertheless, the effective agglomeration of labor and capital is still a key factor driving economic growth. (3) Population exodus poses an obstacle to high-quality economic development. Increased population mobility has a negative impact on both economic growth and high-quality development, exacerbating economic fluctuations, and is not conducive to stability and high-quality development. It is worth noting that although the population base plays a fundamental role in economic growth, the direct effect of population on development is not significant. On the contrary, there is a negative correlation between population outflow and high-quality economic development. Based on the findings, strategic recommendations are made with the aim of promoting a shift from a growth model that relies on population numbers to a development model that focuses on the improvement of population quality in forest areas, thereby realizing a fundamental innovation in the economic development model. This study enriches the theory of regional development in forest areas and is of great significance in promoting sustainable development in forest areas.