Participants will explore the dynamics of food security through visiting community food gardens in Portland Oregon. They will travel to community gardens to tour and speak with neighborhood residents as well as collect information regarding to existing threats to urban agro-sustainability. Garden observations will be guided both by scientific relevance to the theme of each annual conference coupled with community needs and concerns as expressed by community gardeners. It is the goal of this field trip to incorporate both sociological and ecological data. The trip will entail visiting three school and community gardens in Portland and will be a full days trip. In each gardens four groups will be made to collect information through interviews with local gardeners and through ecology research methods pilled up in a field trip observation survey. Group #1). collects questions on the demography aspects of the area (social, income, cultural) and audiovisual accounts on the history of the land (land use questions) and the community organizing, #2.) information on local ecological knowledge on pests and management practices, #3.) ecological information on the size, diversity, and how many crops are growing in various stages of each site and #4.) questions around water and soil resources, ex. rain barrels, composting area, size and conditions. We hope to repeat this field trip every ESA, were we aim to collect a series of data with respect to culturally different community gardens to discuss commonalities and dissimilarities between gardens and eventually in multiple cities. Afterwords we will revise the information and collect maps and land use history on the area for a future analysis and assessment. This field trip will serve as a model for ecologists in ESA to develop long term comparisons on general agroecological information around the cities we visit. The goal of this field trip is to 1.) see how understanding sites conditions can improve yield for the purposes of garden missions be it education, job training, or food production to put on the market, 2.) to develop an ESA endorsed agricultural sustainability metric for urban community farming, and 3.) to use the information to highlight evolving areas of research interest for urban ecology and agroecology. Use as a multi-year study of similar questions and urban gardens workshop in several cities.