CCRI is the largest specialist rural research centre in the UK, having expertise in all aspects of research in policy and planning for the countryside and the environment of the UK, Europe and further afield.
The CCRI has a long pedigree of using traditional research methods within social sciences and collectively has decades of experience within its team. Over the past few months, we have been exploring a set of new research techniques and asking people to help us with their development.
Matt Reed reflects on our recent blog post ‘Superfoods go to the roof!’ and explores some of the arguments behind ‘superfoods’ in connection with the future of food and the future of food in cities.
Matt Reed has been walking the terraces of Cyprus where a team from The Cyprus Institute, as part of the RECARE project, are investigating the role of terraces in preserving the soil. In this blog, Matt talks about the traditions of cultivation of mountain terraces and the the challenge to produce and sell food in a way that develops livelihoods and sustains the environment. Matt was accompanied by Jane Mills.
One of the challenges we face all of the time is how to communicate our sometimes quite complex research findings, especially when those ideas are still in development. One of the best ways is someone talking about the project, or better still a group discussing it. Until now that has been difficult to capture, but podcasting makes it a lot easier. The EU funded project Supurbfood is a very innovative project combining experiences across 7 European city regions and experiences from the global south to discuss short food chains, nutrient recycling and land use (see more at www.supurbfood.eu). We are
http://youtu.be/VqONZ8D6jsw
Janet explaining a piece of CCRI research in 2010.
http://youtu.be/lg2ymJ_TPJQ
Alister discussing a presentation from 2011
Big Cat Survey – Initial Results We had 210 useable responses to the survey. The following tables and graphs present the key frequency figures for the questions. Do you believe that there is a large wild cat in the countryside near Stroud? Response Percentage Number Yes 59 124 No 22.9 48 Don’t know 18.1 38 TOTAL 100 210 The majority of respondents believe that there is a wild cat in the countryside. Just over 40% either do not believe or are uncertain regarding the presence of a wild cat. It is worth commenting that while CCRI wanted comments from those who
Over the next few weeks on this blog we will be publishing the results of the CCRI’s Big Cat Survey. We decided to undertake this survey because people in the area around where the CCRI is based were consistently reporting seeing a creature they generally described as a ‘Big Cat’. After many years of conducting research on life in rural areas we had heard these accounts previously, often in different areas of the UK, and it seemed like a good opportunity to investigate this phenomena in a more systematic way. At that time we promised that we would report on