Berries and Mushrooms - Growing force in the forest

Purpose and goal

The aim of this project was to develop a plan that could provide a local prognosis of the amount and availability of commercial berries and mushrooms. The plan will be presented in a report that will function as a foundation of further development. Thanks to this project we know which steps to take to continue develop a local prognosis. In a continuation, a large scale field trial should be conducted at a County (or smaller) scale to, in practise, evaluate the methods that have been developed during this phase.

Expected results and effects

With the result of this project there is a plan on how to test a more detailed and extended berry prognosis. For mushrooms there are less data so more basic information needs to be found. We see no direct effects from this project and the anticipated results are more long-term since this has been a planning phase to build future projects upon. We expect that the final product of a more detailed and accurate national prognosis of the amount and availability of commercial berries and mushrooms, will have a positive effect on rural development and create job opportunities.

Planned approach and implementation

This project consisted of five parts: knowledge gathering, commercial use, climate data, vegetation properties and inventory methodology. The project achieved satisfying results in all five parts. We found that the most important and effort demanding part was inventory methodology. Within the project group there were two physical meetings and a number of regularly occurring video meetings since the project group´s participants were based in different cities. All participants in the planning phase find value in continuing to collaborate in a development phase.