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Abstract
Coffee is a major tropical commodity crop that can provide supplementary habitat for native wildlife. In Asia, coffee production is an increasingly important driver of landscape transformation and shifts between different coffee species is a major dimension of agroforestry trends. Yet few studies have compared the ecological impacts of conversion between different coffee species. We evaluated whether or not the two species of coffee grown globally—Coffea arabica and C. canephora (denoted “robusta”)—had equivalent avian conservation value in the Western Ghats, India, where robusta production has become increasingly dominant. We found that habitat specialist and functional guild diversity was higher in arabica, and that arabica was more profitable. However, robusta farms generally supported the same or slightly higher abundances of habitat specialists and functional guilds, largely due to dense canopy and landscape-level forest cover. Farming practices, chiefly pesticide use, may affect the suitability of coffee agroforests as habitat for avian specialists, and at present, robusta farmers tended to use less pesticide. Given future projections for arabica to robusta conversion in tropical Asia, our study indicates that certification efforts should prioritize maintaining native canopy shade trees and forest cover to ensure that coffee landscapes can continue providing biodiversity benefits.
Highlights
Coffee is a major tropical commodity crop that can provide supplementary habitat for native wildlife
Across the Western Ghats, coffee agroforest area is slightly more than a quarter of the land area that is formally protected[16]; whether coffee can serve as buffer habitat for wildlife will be critically important to conservation outcomes[19,20]
Robusta agroforests typically supported the same or slightly higher densities of habitat specialists and foraging guilds as arabica, though many of these differences were not significant. This pattern was likely due to the most common forest-dependents and endemics; the observation rates for the five most common forest and endemic bird species were similar across the arabica and robusta agroforests
Summary
Coffee is a major tropical commodity crop that can provide supplementary habitat for native wildlife. In Asia, coffee production is an increasingly important driver of landscape transformation and shifts between different coffee species is a major dimension of agroforestry trends. Robusta farms generally supported the same or slightly higher abundances of habitat specialists and functional guilds, largely due to dense canopy and landscape-level forest cover. Given future projections for arabica to robusta conversion in tropical Asia, our study indicates that certification efforts should prioritize maintaining native canopy shade trees and forest cover to ensure that coffee landscapes can continue providing biodiversity benefits. India is the world’s sixth largest coffee producer and coffee acreage in India has increased by 150% from 1990 to 201515,16 The majority of this expansion occurred in a global biodiversity hotspot, the Western Ghats[17,18,19]. From 1950 to 2015, the planted area of robusta grew by 840% while arabica acreage increased by 327%
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