The UMass Lowell Food Forest was established in spring 2024 and is home to a variety of fruit trees, and edible perennial plants. Located at 46 Wilder Street on South Campus, members of the campus and community can visit and harvest what they need free of charge.

In 2022, mechanical engineering Ph.D. student Alana Smith ’22 received $7,500 from the Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy Sustainability Engagement & Enrichment Development (S.E.E.D.) fund to establish a food forest on campus with the support of her research advisor, Jasmina Burek, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. Hannah Monbleau, assistant director of the Office of Student Life and Well-being also received a $7,500 S.E.E.D. fund to create a labyrinth garden on campus. The projects were paired together for similar themes of wellness and environment, and thus the beginning of a collaboration was born. What started as a 2022 S.E.E.D grant submission has blossomed into a multi-faceted interdisciplinary project involving faculty, staff, and students across campus and members of the community. Joy Winbourne, Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Dr. Burek have received additional funds from an Office of Research and Innovation 2023 Internal Seed Award, and an Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) Challenge Grant Implementing the Commonwealth’s Healthy Soils Action Plan in 2024 that were essential in bringing this site vision to completion and establishing the research program.

On Arbor Day 2024, the Food Forest team was joined by students, faculty, staff, and community members to plant the first fruit trees in a grand opening celebration. Key collaborations have made this project unique and successful and are serving as a model for other universities. The Rist Institute has provided support on this project beyond funding, from logistics to connections. Kevin Block, Grounds Operations Manager, has been integral to the food forest project since day one. His experience with contractors and arborist knowledge has been crucial to its success. UMass Lowell became a certified arboretum in 2023, and the food forest has added more tree diversity to our inventory. Hannah Monbleau has brought her wellbeing knowledge to the food forest, to help create a welcoming place to relax. In the summer and fall of 2024 the team added the labyrinth, swing, benches, and a greenhouse as a first step. Jasmina Burek and Joy Winbourne lead collaborative research at the food forest site developing an environmental life cycle assessment framework using biogeochemical data sets from the food forest.

Food forests are a back-to-nature approach to food systems and so much more. Deeply rooted in permaculture principles, food forests are multifunctional biodiverse agroforestry systems comprised of edible plants. Food forests are designed to mimic natural forests, and consequently consist of several layers.

  1. Canopy (for example: walnut tree)
  2. Understory (for example: peach tree)
  3. Shrub (for example: raspberry bush)
  4. Herbaceous (for example: mint)
  5. Ground Cover (for example: clover)
  6. Root (for example: onions)
  7. Vine (for example: kiwi berries)
  8. Fungi (for example: mushrooms)

Groupings of plants, or guilds, in a food forest are selected to satisfy both layers and functions of the system. Functions include plants performing symbiotic nitrogen fixation, attracting diversity of pollinators, and are deep rooted. This allows plants to support each other as they grow, and in turn provide higher yields with less resources. This structure makes food forests a more resilient choice in our changing climate. Food forests provide both co-benefits to people (called ecosystem services), and to nature. Beyond food provisioning, food forests provide shading and local cooling effects, increased biodiversity, mitigation of stormwater runoff, mitigation of criteria air pollutants, and many more environmental benefits. From a social standpoint a food forest is a lasting place for community connection and relaxation.

A labyrinth garden is a thoughtfully designed, winding path with one single, continuous route leading to a central point and back out again. Labyrinths have a rich history dating back thousands of years and are used for spiritual and meditative purposes.

The Office of Student Life & Well-being chose to implement this labyrinth as a part of the food forest to create an opportunity for pause, a space between an inhale and an exhale. Just as the food forest contributes to the health and well-being of the environment, the labyrinth contributes to your own personal health and well-being by providing an opportunity for stress reduction, mental clarity, and spiritual connection.

Walk the labyrinth path, eat the beautiful food grown in the food forest, and reflect on how this space beautifully supports the health and well-being of both us as individuals and the planet as whole.

The Food Forest is a living laboratory home to collaborative research, and educational experiences. Professor Jasmina Burek and Ph.D. student Alana Smith are combining their engineering and life cycle assessment (LCA) expertise with Professor Joy Winbourne’s expertise in biogeochemistry to create a novel Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method to include ecosystem services currently underrepresented in LCA. Food forests provide a variety of ecosystems services, including food provisioning, increased biodiversity, mitigation of criteria air pollutants, mitigation of stormwater runoff, and more. Our current research efforts are focused on the ecosystem services of local climate regulation by urban heat island mitigation, and global climate regulation. The team has tracked the creation of the food forest to understand what happens when a vacant lot is transformed into a food forest. The food forest is serving as a case study to validate their method.

Winbourne and her team have instrumented the UML Food Forest, and neighboring business-as-usual greenspace, lawn behind Coburn Hall with a variety of sensors and soil collars to capture changes in both sites. Alessandro Sabato, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, and his students are assisting in the urban heat island portion of the research by conducting drone flights over the sites to understand urban heat island effect across greenspaces.

Students have visited the forest site and participated in activities for a variety of classes. Winbourne brings her Soils class to take soils samples of the site. Students from Alison Hamilton’s Principles of Ecology and Field Techniques course evaluated biodiversity on the site prior to the creation of the food forest. Associate art and design professor, Marie Frank has brought several of her classes to the food forest for a tour and lecture. Adjunct art and design professor, Jess Wilson brought her class to the site to learn about the design creation of the food forest.

Winbourne and Burek were awarded an Office of Research and Innovation 2023 Internal Seed Award, and an Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) Challenge Grant Implementing the Commonwealth’s Healthy Soils Action Plan in 2024 to pursue this research. One year of Smith’s research was sponsored by the SWIMMER fellowship program at UMass Lowell.