A model of food forestry and its monitoring framework in the context of ecological restoration

Food forestry has grown in its popularity in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, which it has not been traditionally practiced before, for its potential to produce healthy food, to create habitat for wildlife species, to reconnect people with nature and to provide various ecosystem services such as carbon storage. Diverse food forest projects are conceived from urban food initiatives to integrated conservation and restoration planning. Currently, the Galiano Conservancy Association is creating two food forests in the heart of a mature Coastal Douglas-fir landscape on Galiano Island, British Columbia, which is protected under a conservation covenant, in pursuit of sustainable food production, education and contribution to ecological restoration and conservation efforts. To investigate the relationships between emerging food forestry and ecological restoration and to identify key indicators to measure best practices of food forestry in the context of ecological restoration, I conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with food forestry and ecological restoration experts. In addition, I conducted a workshop with the Conservancy stakeholders to develop a comprehensive and systematic monitoring framework for their food forest projects. My studies suggest that restoration principles and resilience thinking can provide guidelines for restorative food forestry. Food forestry may serve as an innovative restoration tool to restore urban landscapes where lack significant opportunities for conventional restoration. A generic monitoring framework for food forestry could be adapted by other projects, yet this will require the process of defining goals and objectives of a given project and assessing landscape contexts and the organization’s capacity to monitor.

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