Coffee agroforests in India’s Western Ghats mountains, where coffee shrubs are grown under the shade of trees, could be a good source of seeds for forest restoration efforts, according to a recent study, reports Mongabay India’s Simrin Sirur.
Much of India’s coffee is grown in the rain-rich Western Ghats, a global biodiversity hotspot. Coffee farms have fragmented the region’s tropical forests, but many plantation owners intentionally grow coffee under the shade of a rich variety of native trees. Seeds of these trees, typically cleared by farmers during canopy pruning, can instead be “rescued” and cultivated in nurseries for forest restoration projects, researchers found.
“In the past, some of those seeds might have survived and those trees might have grown, but today they’re getting slashed because farmers do not want trees growing in places that will compromise the productivity of their crop,” Anand Osuri, the study’s lead author and a scientist with the nonprofit Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), told Sirur. “The act of removing those seeds and seedlings is a form of rescue.”
To test the viability of seed collection from coffee agroforests, Osuri and his colleagues at NCF collaborated with coffee growers in the Western Ghats of Karnataka state. They surveyed eight agroforests and recorded 3,755 trees from 102 species. In fact, “the numbers of restoration-relevant and conservation priority species recorded in coffee were considerably higher than those available in local public nurseries operated by the forest administration, which are the main suppliers of trees in the project area and most other parts of India,” the researchers write.
Forest restoration efforts require seeds and seedlings representing the diversity of native species. These can be sourced from forests, but there’s a risk of overextraction, while those collected from roadsides and forest edges may not capture the diversity. However, coffee agroforests offer a high diversity of species with abundant seeds: During the study, the researchers collected 14,000 seeds and 4,200 seedlings from roughly 50 native species, Sirur reports.
“In coffee agroforests, you are not only getting a large number of seeds and seedlings that were fated to die anyway, had they been left where they were, but they’re also local to the region,” Osuri said. “They’re from the same landscape, and so the plants are potentially adapted to local soils, local climates, which is very important for restoration.”
Sohan Shetty, owner of a coffee plantation and a study co-author, said they also set up nets to catch bird droppings around trees, and rescued seeds from them.
However, there are challenges to scaling up seed retrieval from coffee agroforests, including incentivizing coffee growers to grow coffee under the shade of more native trees rather than nonnative but low-maintenance species like silver oak. There are also not enough nurseries to raise the rescued seeds and seedlings.
Read the full story by Simrin Sirur here.
Banner image of a shade-grown coffee plantation in the Western Ghats by Anand Osuri via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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