Biodiversity Monitoring in Food Forests

Food forests are considered as a biodiversity-friendly land use concept. However, there is a lack of extended, systematic and standardised long-term biodiversity monitoring activities to obtain sufficient data on the actual impact of food forestry on biodiversity. In order to improve such approaches, this work aimed to gain an understanding of 1) the current state and professionality level of existing biodiversity monitoring concepts in food forest projects and 2) influencing social-ecological context factors. To this end, I conducted 1) a broad online survey and 2) semi structured interviews with German and Dutch experts from four food forest project cases performing biodiversity monitoring activities to different extents on their site. Among the food forest project (cases), I found heterogeneous characteristics and levels of professionality of the biodiversity monitoring activities, which were primarily attributed to context factors related to actors, governance systems and social, economic, and political settings. For instance, the professionality of biodiversity monitoring activities depended on the availability of volunteers and experts as well as funding opportunities. My results imply that food forest projects interested in professionalised biodiversity monitoring activities could benefit, for example, from expert-based identification tools and data platforms, such as ObsIdentify / Observation.org, as well as collaboration with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and universities. Most importantly, however, they emphasise that food forestry stakeholder (scientists, experts, political actors) must foster the establishment of an integrated, standardised and systematic biodiversity monitoring concept for food forests that includes citizen science (CS) approaches, as well as the institutionalisation of the concept of food forestry in general. Overall, the following work provides valuable insights and implications for biodiversity monitoring activities in food forests projects, which could be used to improve such activities in the future. This is urgently needed to demonstrate the impact of food forestry on biodiversity, and, in turn, increase political and societal support for the concept of food forestry.