Food and Agricultural Geography Research Group is a cluster of researchers of the Department of Environmental Geography, Institute of Geonics, Czech Academy of Sciences, who are dealing with issues of food and agriculture and ways how both phenomena are recently hugely changing as a results of our ongoing environmental crisis. Our interdisciplinary group includes geographers, sociologists, landscape ecologists, GIS specialists who intensvely collaborate with collegues of similar interests from other Czech universities (namely with the University of South Bohemia, Mendel University, Tomas Bata University) but also by means of international projects with international agricultural and food experts around the world.

Among key topics that we are interested in belong:

- agricultural development in Central Europe

- peri-urban agriculture

- alternative food networks

- food self-provisioning

We are working on many research projects funded by both national and international funding bodies and are always keen to share our expertise with practicioners and decision-makers. We believe that practical impact of our studies belongs to key elements of our work.

Our projects

2021-2024: Strategy AV21: The Program: Foods for Future, Topic: Societal and Geographical Aspects of Food Systems (funded by the Czech Academy of Sciences). The research program is oriented to empowering and interconnecting the cooperation between the innstitutes of the Czech Academy of Sciences and is dealing with multiple issues linked to food production and consumption. The Program Food for Futur is lead by the Institute of Experimental Botany.

2019-2021: New Challenges for food security and cultural landscape protection. (The Czech Academy of Science Programme for research and mobility support of starting researchers). The main aim of the project was to explore new understanding of food security and actual trends that are evolving around the issues of food production and consumption. The project was solved together with the University of Florence, Department of Architecture, Regional Planning and Design.

2018-2019: Between de-agrisation and perforated development of rural space: The search for development patterns of post-communist agricultural properties (funded by the Czech Science Foundation, no 19-23870S). Overall aim of the project is to advance our understanding of socio-spatial processes occurring around agricultural brownfields during agricultural transition in the Czech Republic after 1989.

2013- 2016: Horizon2020 TUD COST Action TD1106 Urban Agriculture Europe. International project aimed to conceptually develop our comprehension of the phenomena of urban agriculture. The COST-Action Urban Agriculture Europe (UAE) initiated the definition of an European approach to urban agriculture and founded a network of over 120 researchers from 29 countries worldwide. The project was chaired by Professor Frank Lohrberg of Aachen University, Germany.