Abstract
In tropical regions, land-use pressures between natural forest, commercial tree plantations, and agricultural land for rural communities are widespread. One option is to increase the functionality of commercial plantations by allowing agroforestry within them by rural communities. Such land-sharing options could address wider societal and environmental issues and reduce pressure on natural forest. To investigate the trade-offs involved, we used InVEST to model the ecosystem services provided by growing coffee under commercial pine plantations in Indonesia against other land-use options. Pine–coffee agroforestry provided worse supporting and regulating services (carbon, sediment and nitrogen retention, catchment runoff) than natural forest; however, it provided greater provisioning services (product yield) directly to smallholders. Converting pine monoculture into pine-coffee agroforestry led to increases in all ecosystem services, although there was an increased risk to water quality. Compared with coffee and root crop monocultures, pine–coffee agroforestry provided higher levels of supporting and regulating services; however, product yields were lower. Thus, opening up pine plantations for agroforestry realises additional income-generating opportunities for rural communities, provides wider ecosystem service benefits, and reduces pressure for land-use change. Lower smallholder yields could be addressed through the management of shade levels or through Payments for Ecosystem Services schemes.
Highlights
Land-use change for agriculture is the fundamental threat for tropical forest ecosystems [1]
We aimed to address the question of whether pine–coffee agroforestry achieves a balance in ecosystem service outputs and can be considered as a sustainable development strategy
Agroforestry led to a lower (4%) increase in the carbon storage compared with monoculture pine plantations (Figure 2)
Summary
Land-use change for agriculture is the fundamental threat for tropical forest ecosystems [1]. Combining shade trees and crops can provide secondary products, such as timber and fruits [11,12], enabling the diversification of income and protection against crashes in crop prices [13]. Often, this takes the form of adding or retaining shade trees in a system where the understory crop is the focus. Ministry of Environment and estry land-cover map [36]. Combined with a classification of tree type within their producForestry land-cover map [36] combined with a classification of tree type within their tion forest class. The catchments, the landthe cover predominately of agriculproduction forestWithin class.
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