With the backdrop of climate change and biodiversity loss, environmental movements, such as the Rights of Nature movement, are turning to new legal concepts to end the destruction of more-than-human ecologies. A parallel trend to this can be identified in the repurposing of digital infrastructures for species reporting and records to affect how nature is accounted for by administrative legal bodies as well as the courts. In this manner, activists seek to bypass slow democratic governance structures without altering the legal concepts of environmental legal protection for certain ecologies. (Turner & Wiber 2023). Such transformative politics of species reports in courts and in media and the environmental imaginary they produce in public society currently remain under-researched. Drawing upon the example of Swedish forests, this paper seeks to contribute with empirical data on how species observations are transformed in the interface between the species reporting person, the digital infrastructure, the administrative bodies as well as the courts, into what is considered a protection-worthy ecology. Furthermore, it show-cases how this transformation activates a conflict between property rights holders (of forests) and species reporting persons and how the latter are being framed as activists hindering the effective use of property rights. As such, Swedish forests constitute today a conflict zone of many rivalling legal, scientific, cultural and ecological interests. In the performative realms of courts, the open data-infrastructures of science, and the discursive spaces of public environmental culture – new forest futures are taking shape at the intersection of the Swedish Information System, Artportalen as the new data-driven “theater of proof” of forest biodiversity (Latour 1988; 2004). This paper examines how the legal system carries out the balancing of interests between species and forest property right holder’s land use through the valuation of Artportalen data. As such, it contributes with an understanding of how the production of rare species through the species database produces legal effects that capture and analyse the creation and contestation of species data as a means to hinder certain forms of forest management and facilitate others. Furthermore, it suggests that the environmentalisms explored here also distributes epistemic authority, reimagines citizenship and legal rights, and re-invents notions of power and agency among humans, other species and whole ecologies.