Christoph Schunko

University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna | boku · Department of Sustainable Agricultural Systems

The use of wild edible plants and mushrooms can help to counteract the homogenisation of diets and decreasing resilience of food systems. We performed a systematic review to consolidate information about perceptions of wild edible plant and mushroom changes from the perspective of local communities. We found that 92% of all perceived changes of wil...

Herbicides are on the rise across the developing world. Herbicides may come with several advantages but can also undermine environmental and human health. In the quest to assess the trade-offs of herbicides one aspect has received limited attention: the role of edible weeds, which can be key elements of rural food baskets, yet are targeted by herbi...

Urban wild food foraging is increasingly attracting attention as an activity in urban green spaces that encourages urban residents’ interaction with their natural environment. However, little is known about the criteria influencing urban foragers’ selection of foraging locations that could inform urban green space management and planning to encoura...

Background Rice field agroecosystems produce food for more than half of the world’s population and deliver important services supporting farmers’ livelihoods. However, traditional rice field agroecosystems are facing a variety of problems, including pests or markets that are hard to access. This research explored indigenous farmers’ perceptions of...

Meaningful human–nature interactions can counteract the extinction of experience and positively influence people’s nature relatedness, health and wellbeing. In this study, we explored urban wild food foraging to understand how best to enable human-nature interactions in cities by means of foraging. Using a structured questionnaire, a total of 458 r...

Background Local plant knowledge typically is unevenly distributed within a community. This knowledge variation is important in understanding people’s relationship with their environment. Here we ask about knowledge variation among farmers’ families in the Napf region of Switzerland. Methods In 2008 and 2009, 60 adults and children living on 14 fa...

Wild food foraging in urban areas can have considerable benefits, but concerns have been raised by public authorities about its potential negative ecological impacts. In this study, our aim was to explore experts’ perspectives on the foraging practices that prevent, limit, or cause negative ecological impacts in urban areas, and how different level...

Herbicides are on the rise across the developing world. Herbicides may come with several advantages, for example, they may help to improve yields, thereby contributing to food and nutrition security. However, they may negatively affect environmental and human health. In the quest to assess the trade-offs of herbicide use, one aspect has received li...

Organically-certified wild plant foods are rarely addressed in scientific or public discourses on organic food even though 30% of the world’s organically-certified land is dedicated to wild plant gathering. This oversight may leave organic consumers unaware of the market relevance of wild plant foods. The aim of this study was therefore to understa...

During 2019, the EIP-AGRI Focus Group on Plant-based Medicinal and Cosmetic Products has analysed the key factors that influence farmers and foresters to enter the Medicinal and Aromatic Plant (MAP) sector. The main question was: ‘How to create diversification opportunities for farmers through innovative value chains of plant-based medicinal and co...

Background: In Europe and the Mediterranean, over-exploitation and destructive harvesting techniques have been identified as two critical threats affecting the sustainable harvesting of wild medicinal plant (WMP) species. However, unsustainable harvesting is not an issue everywhere and localized assessments are needed. Local knowledge has been pra...

Organically-certified wild food plants are rarely addressed in scientific or public discourses on organic food even though 30 % of the world’s organically-certified land is dedicated to wild plant gathering. This oversight may leave organic consumers unaware of the market relevance of wild food plants. The aim of this study was therefore to underst...

The gathering and commercialisation of non-timber forest products (NTFP) in Europe has repeatedly been praised for its potential to support rural development. However, political support mechanisms explicitly targeting NTFP remain underdeveloped. In this study, we aimed to contribute to the design of support mechanisms by understanding the factors t...

European countries are split over the appreciation of wild berries, fruits, mushrooms, and herbs. While some countries provide public statistics on wild plants, others seem to neglect wild plant gathering and commercialization. In this study, we aimed to understand if wild plant commercialization is neglected or irrelevant in Austria, a country tha...

Background Ethically sound research in applied ethnobiology should benefit local communities by giving them full access to research processes and results. Participatory research may ensure such access, but there has been little discussion on methodological details of participatory approaches in ethnobiological research. This paper presents and disc...

This article explores the relationship between institutional funding for research and community-based or co-enquiry research practice. It examines the implementation of co-enquiry research in the COMBIOSERVE project, which was funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme for research and innovation, between the years 2012 and 201...

Indigenous and rural communities have developed strategies aimed at supporting their livelihoods and protecting biodiversity. Motivational factors underlying these local conservation strategies, however, are still a largely neglected topic. We aimed to enrich the conceptualization of community-based conservation by exploring trigger events and moti...

Wild plant gathering becomes again a popular and fashionable activity in Europe after gathering practices have been increasingly abandoned over the last decades. Recent ethnobotanical research documented a diversity of gathering practices from people of diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds who gather in urban and rural areas. Few efforts...

The creative process that leads to farmers’ innovations is rarely studied or described precisely in agricultural sciences. For academic scientists, obvious limitations of farmers’ experiments are e.g. precision, reliability, robustness, accuracy, validity or the correct analysis of cause and effect. Nevertheless, we propose that ‘farmers’ experimen...

The creative process that leads to farmers' innovations is rarely studied or described precisely in agricultural sciences. For academic scientists, obvious limitations of farmers' experiments are e.g. precision, reliability, robustness, accuracy, validity or the correct analysis of cause and effect. Nevertheless, we propose that 'farmers' experimen...

Background In ethnobotanical research, the investigation into traditional knowledge of medicinal plants in the context of migration has been of increasing interest in recent decades since it is influenced and changed by new environmental and social conditions. It most likely undergoes transformation processes to match the different living circumsta...

Wild plant gathering is an essential element in livelihood strategies all over the world. However due to changing circumstances in Europe, the reason for gathering has altered from one of necessity in the past to a pleasurable activity today. Wild plant gathering has therefore also received renewed attention as a form of intangible cultural heritag...

Background Leading scholars in ethnobiology and ethnomedicine continuously stress the need for moving beyond the bare description of local knowledge and to additionally analyse and theorise about the characteristics and dynamics of human interactions with plants and related local knowledge. Analyses of the variation of local knowledge are thereby p...

Changing lifestyles have recently caused a severe reduction of the gathering of wild food plants. Knowledge about wild food plants and the local environment becomes lost when plants are no longer gathered. In Central Europe popular scientific publications have tried to counter this trend. However, detailed and systematic scientific investigations i...