‘A pan-European project to support the sustainable exploitation of forest resources for rural development’
In 2012 Reforesting Scotland (RS) was invited to join a consortium bidding for 4 years of EU research funding. The bid was successful, and RS became a partner in the StarTree research project, studying ‘non-wood forest products and multi-purpose trees’ (NWFPs and MPTs).
As an SME partner (rather than an academic institution), RS’s role was to engage with people on the ground within our own region. For the first few months of data collection RS consultants responded to requests from academic colleagues, answering questionnaires and delivering surveys, helping to build a picture of the State of the European NWFP sector. These were followed by in-depth case studies on institutions and innovation, which gave us our first chance to influence the direction of the work. At the same time we began action research, the part of the work which was designed almost entirely by RS and our partners within Scotland.
Throughout the project we attended 6-monthly meetings around Europe; we helped to raise awareness of the project and disseminate its outputs; and we drew together and engaged with a StarTree regional stakeholder group.
StarTree spanned four years from November 2012 to October 2016. It provided new impetus to RS’s forest products work, took us in directions we might not otherwise have gone, and gave us a taste of collaborating with organisations and academics across Europe.
This section of the website provides a record of some of StarTree’s outputs, showing how Reforesting Scotland’s activities linked into StarTree’s academic work streams and the formal project reports.
Reforesting Scotland
