Image 2: Walking through a shade-coffee farm in
Chiapas, Mexico.
Image 3: A Miconia affinis tree growing
within a shade-coffee farm in Chiapas, Mexico. M. affinis is a small, native understory tree that many farmers
allow to invade their shade-coffee farms because the trees help control soil
erosion.
Each year, an estimated 32.1 million
acres of tropical forest are destroyed to make room for crops, pasture for
grazing animals, and logging. Coffee crops, which cover more than 27 million
acres of land in many of the world's most biodiverse regions, are often grown
adjacent to remnant forest patches.
But in Latin America, over the past 30
years, coffee farmers have switched from the traditional shade-grown method
where plants are grown beneath a diverse canopy of trees, to sun coffee, a
process that involves thinning or removing the canopy. Studies show that
shade-grown farms increase biodiversity. Not only do they provide shelter for
migrating birds, non-migratory bats and other species, but they require far
less synthetic fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides than sun-coffee farms.
"A concern in tropical agriculture
areas is that increasingly fragmented landscapes isolate native plant
populations, eventually leading to lower genetic diversity," said Christopher
Dick, a U-M assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. "But
this study shows that specialized native bees help enhance the fecundity and
the genetic diversity of remnant native trees, which could serve as reservoirs
for future forest regeneration."
Credit: Shalene Jha, University of
California, Berkeley
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