Reconciling coffee productivity and natural vegetation conservation in an agroecosystem landscape in Brazil

Abstract

Politicians have approved significant changes to the Brazilian Forest Code (Brazilian Law n. 12.651/2012), providing partial pardons for illegal deforestation in 2012. Nonetheless, the New Forest Code (NFC) may cause economic harm, since ecosystem services may be affected, and the productivity of several crops may end up decreasing. Here, we explored two sets of factors, one at a narrow-scale – the loss of close natural vegetation cover – and another at a wide-scale considering implications at a landscape level to measure the effects of the presence/absence of forest remnants, and consequently, of pollinators, on coffee productivity. The narrow-scale perspective used manipulative experiments in ten coffee plantations, and the wide-scale perspective considered secondary data on coffee productivity in planted and native forests of 61 municipalities to test the hypotheses: i) coffee branches with pollinator access are more productive; ii) coffee crops in contact with native forest remnants are more productive; iii) coffee plants located near to native forest remnants are more productive; iv) coffee productivity increases with the municipality area occupied by native forest remnants, and, v) coffee productivity decreases with the municipality area occupied by Eucalyptus spp. At the narrow-scale, we detected 32 % higher coffee productivity when pollinators were present (hypothesis i) and 15 % higher productivity when forest remnants were in contact with the plantation (hypothesis ii), but no differences related to forest remnants in the broader area (hypothesis iii). At the wide-scale, we observed that a higher amount of native forest cover increased coffee productivity (hypothesis iv), while increased Eucalyptus spp. plantations reduced coffee productivity (hypothesis v). The corroboration of hypotheses i, ii, and iv illustrates the importance of animal pollination and native vegetation remnants fr coffee productivity. The findings for hypothesis v reinforce that Eucalyptus spp. plantations are not good surrogates for native vegetation as part of management recovery action for deforested areas. Following the New Forest Code’s recommendations in Article 22 (Chapter IV, Section II), the preservation of native vegetation, species diversity, and native species regeneration should be attended to in legally instituted natural reserves. Our findings improve discernment that natural areas' devastation or its coverage using planted forest may reduce productivity levels of coffee plantations, representing a disruption of natural complexity, of organisms' connectivity, and consequently of ecosystem services as the pollination and pollinator-dependent crops' productivity, as the coffee.