Abstract
Resistance and resilience have become important concepts in the evaluation of disturbance events, providing a framework that is useful in light of the expected increase in frequency and occurrences of hurricanes as a consequence of climate change. Hurricane Maria landed on Puerto Rico as a category 4 storm in September of 2017. Among the affected elements were agricultural systems, including coffee agroecosystems. Historically, coffee has been a major backbone of the island’s agricultural sector. Grown with a range of management styles, the coffee agroecosystem provides an excellent model system to study the resistance/resilience of agroecosystems faced with hurricane disturbance. Sampling 28 farms and comparing pre-hurricane data (2013) with post hurricane data we find that management style had only a small effect on either resistance or resilience, likely due to the especially strong nature of the storm. Rather, the socio-political context of individual farms seems to be a more useful predictor of resilience.
Highlights
Caribbean islands are highly vulnerable to hurricanes
A preliminary assessment by the US Geological Survey (USGS: https://landslides.usgs.gov/research/featured/2017/maria-pr/) shows that in the central western region of Puerto Rico, where most coffee farms are located, most areas had fewer than 25 landsides per Km2, there were some areas with more than 25 landslides per Km2, while others had no landslides in cells of four Km2
It may be the case that Hurricane Maria was an especially strong hurricane such that vegetative wind breaks were ineffective
Summary
Caribbean islands are highly vulnerable to hurricanes. Recent models of the effects of climate change predict substantial increases in the intensity and the frequency of the most intense tropical cyclones in the Atlantic and increases on the order of 20% in the precipitation rate within 100 kilometers of the storm center[1,2]. The resilience literature usually begins with the ball-in-well metaphor (Fig. 1), a useful framework for explaining the general idea, though even at this level of generality, obvious complexities emerge[10] The relationship between canopy cover and wind is well known[11], with a general expectation that shade trees will act as wind breaks and damage will be less severe in agroforestry systems than in systems without trees[12,13,14] Such expectations are conditioned on normal wind gusts, not the truly catastrophic winds of a category 4 hurricane. We expect the coffee systems with lower intensification (diverse and shaded systems) to have higher levels of resistance and resilience than the more intensified systems with lower levels of diversity, as suggested by the limited literature on this point[20,29,30]
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