Food Forest International Research Network - Membership

Hello, as forest gardener, site manager or researcher you already made a valuable contribution to forest garden research through the baseline survey or at the last IPC in London. Today we invite you to be part of the Food Forest International Research Network (FFIRN). The FFIRN emerged from discussions at the International Permaculture Convergence in 2015, where the need and interest for practitioners and researchers to join forces was recognised. It will be placed under the umbrella of the Permaculture International Research Network (PIRN).

If you would like to contribute and be involved in the network, please take this brief survey by the 25th January. It collects general information about your work, resources and fields of interest. Your participation will help to fill gaps in knowledge about how we can adapt ecosystem thinking to a sustainable and more resilient food production. The information you give will be used to gain a picture of the worldwide effort to understand and develop food forests. Your personal data will only be shared if you explicitly permit us to do so, and in the ways indicated on the survey pages.

The Goals
Our core activity will be to develop a worldwide network. It's purpose is to study food forests across the globe, to enable and support food forestry practices and research. We will gather key information about polycultures and make them accessible to practitioners and researchers, and we will enable people to connect with each other and to access the resources they need.

The focus is on food forests or forest gardens, by which we mean multi-storey perennial polycultures. This may include annuals and herbaceous polycultures as part of this, but we will not focus specifically on annual polycultures as there is already plenty of research going into them.

Geographical and thematic sub-groupings may emerge over time and are likely to be defined by the group membership. We would like to have at least one member from each major world region represented in the core group.

To this end, we will collate and present information about food forest practitioners and researchers so that they can access each other's work. We will identify and publicise best practice in food forests, research methodologies and results, tools for the design and management of food forests and other relevant resources. Furthermore we will develop research themes and projects that are of use and interest to our understanding of food forests and invite people to contribute to research.

Thank you for your contribution
The FFIRN core team