International Forestry Students Symposium (IFSS) – Germany 2023 🇩🇪
Dear one, this is an overview of my personal experience in the IFSS 2023. If you are curious about this wonderful symposium, I encourage you to keep reading and let’s dive together into this amazing experience.
First of all,
What is IFSS?
The IFSS (International Forestry Student Symposium) is the biggest event run by IFSA. Every year, since 1973, IFSA members reunite in one country that will be the host of 2 wonderful weeks full of knowledge, lectures, fieldwork, workshops, networking and friendship. Some of the locations where this event took place in the past were Canada, Chile, Australia, and South Africa, among others, as you may notice, we are in almost all the continents, and the upcoming symposium will be Romania 2024 and Indonesia 2025 (keep an eye on if you want to participate on it).
Photo: Jonas Sitte.
The event happened approximately in the middle of August and it corresponded perfectly with the end of the term of the officials (the persons who worked voluntarily for IFSA and made this big organization). It is wonderful to be one of the participants, because after almost a year full of virtual meetings working side by side in the different departments that IFSA has, finally you can meet in person your peers. However, not only officials participated in this meeting, but also, some members from different local committees (LCs) all over the world, can apply and be part of this event. So if you want to be part of this, you only need to belong to the IFSA family.
Photo: Jonas Sitte.
Who were the participants?
This year the event took place in Germany and we had the privilege to travel around the country visiting seven cities (Eberswalde, Tharandt, Erfurt, Neuschönau, Freiburg, Bonn and Göttingen), our wonderful OC (Organization committee), let more than 100 persons participate in this event, that came from over 37 countries from around the world.
Without a doubt, one of the most multicultural experiences that you can ever have. Following the gender equality politics of IFSA and the OC, the event had a distribution of 60% of people who identified as women and 40% of people who identified as men.
I want to highlight that in the history of IFSA, this symposium was one of the most diverse in terms of participants from different countries and this wouldn’t be possible without the financial support of the federal ministry of Germany, IFSA and private companies.
Photo: Karen Gómez.
Also, I want to give a special thanks to the OC, who could handle the huge responsibility of being in charge and taking care of more than 100 participants. They always make sure that every place should be a safe place, so they created this clever system of “Care bear team 🐻” where some members of the OC were in charge of making sure that everyone felt comfortable and safe.
Let’s go to the symposium
Lectures
The first day arrived and the symposium started. We received a warm welcome speech from the president and internal councilor of IFSA, leaders of the OC and representatives of the federal ministry of Germany. As the host country, we received an overview of the German forest and its challenges and we took some lectures about forest management, one of the main lessons I learned that day and which I reconfirmed in the following days was that as forest students and in a context of climate change, we need to keep in mind that sometimes nature conservation by itself it is not enough, management is necessary, especially in countries like Germany who were highly affected by plagues such as bark beetle, so in this context is important to change the model from a monoculture or pure stands to a mixed forest or continuous forest system.
Photo: Jonas Sitte.
Taking knowledge outside the classroom
On the third day, we had the opportunity to visit the oldest forest botanical garden in the world, The Forstbotanischer Garten Tharandt, nowadays this arboretum contains about 180 species and a variety of woody plants. And keeping the momentum, the next days were full of lectures in the forest about various forest and ecological topics.
According to the legislation in Germany, everyone has free access to the forest, even if they are private property, in contrast to other countries (where most of the participants come from) where if you enter a private forest, you can receive a sanction or in the most extreme cases you can even be shot. However, that doesn’t mean that everything related to forests is accepted by the local people. We also learned about a problematic topic related to the establishment of a National park. Local people sometimes refuse to accept the creation of a new one near their forest because that means they can’t use the forest and wood anymore, so one of the sources of income that people have can disappear. From an ecological point of view, even though Germany doesn’t have pristine forests anymore (mostly because they used almost all the wood during and after World War II), it is important to keep places where forest can follow their cycle because, in the long term, the composition of species will be the closest to nature that they can have, and know which species grow and adapt better in particular places it will be a solution against plague, drought, desertification, among others.
Photo: Janna Hammer.
Another important topic that we saw was how knowledge about the ecology of the species can help to prevent future loss of plantations such as the thousands of hectares that Germany and Europe lost to the attack of bark beetles. It is important to make decisions based on scientific knowledge, and this is one of the reasons why foresters and forestry science are so important to society.
In other excursions, we learned about Wildlife Management. In some parts of Europe and in particular, in Germany, they have problems with deer. This was the consequence of past years where people hunted predators, and that produced an overpopulation of deer. Different types of deer such as roe deer, and red deer among others, feed on the shoots of the trees, this means the natural regeneration does not develop, causing serious damage to the forest. One of the main solutions is to develop a hunting program, where you know the number of individuals to hunt, the sex, the approximate age and in which season to do it. In this situation, sport hunting contributes to the natural regeneration of the forest.
Workshops
During this event, we had two types of workshops, some that were led by IFSA and others that were led by the OC, as far as I remember in every workshop that I participated the lead group ensured that everyone felt safe to make their own opinion, know in advance that there are not right or wrong answers, only sharing opinions, brings the IFSA family more ideas and confidence (especially to the persons for whom it was their first event) to share their ideas.
IFSA events, especially the IFSS provide spaces to share and listen to ideas from people with different backgrounds than our own, our reality and type of forest are quite different, for example, European students and African or Asian students can relate those differences, but also we can share similarities and experiences that we can replicate in our own countries.
Photo: IFSA source.
Among other things
Photo: Jonas Sitte.
Other activities that we made in this symposium were the general assembly sessions, whose main purpose is to inform and solve doubts about IFSA and also we had elections for the new board for the term 2023/2024 and head of commissions. This space is important because it helps people understand and get involved in IFSA stuff. It is amazing to see how many people get motivated about being part of IFSA as an official. There is nothing better than hearing directly from a person who has experience in how to work on IFSA.
We also have time to develop funny activities and exchange part of our culture on the “International Night”, every delegation or participant brings something representative of their community or country and shows us about their food, drinks, customs and typical dance, at the end of the night we learn about each other and dance together trying to do new dance steps for another part of the world.
As you may have noticed, being part of the IFSS is such an amazing experience where you develop not only knowledge but also friendships, expose yourself to different cultures, and at the end of the day, keep memories for the rest of your life.
I hope that many people will be encouraged to participate in future IFSA events, so we can keep developing a world that appreciates the forest.
Author: Gabriela Veneros Zerpa
