Naomi van der Velden

I am a plant ecologist with an interest in spatial and temporal patterns of plant community development. I am especially inspired by food-producing plant communities such as mixed-veg polycultures and forest gardens.

I started working with the Permaculture Association in 2011 to investigate productivity of household systems using these mixed veg systems (see Research and Mixed Veg pages of the PA website). These systems look to be highly productive (up to 100 tonnes per hectare (if we had 1000 households each planting one square metre)! See the full results here. 

I've worked as a Lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Leeds, and a Senior Lecturer in Ecology and Sustainability at the University of Cumbria.  I did my PDC in 2009.  I now work for the Permaculture Association and, in collaboration with other excellent partner organisations, on the GROW Observatory to further citizen research.  The website links below take you to some of our interesting articles and more information about the citizen research experiment investigating polycultures and monocultures.