The researchers, led by WCS Associate Conservation Scientist Dr. Krithi Karanth, surveyed for bird assortment in coffee agroforests in India's Western Ghats region. Previous analysis has approved that shade-grown coffee (typically Arabica) can anchorage abundant levels of biodiversity. But coffee assembly is globally alive against Robusta, which uses a added accelerated full-sun agronomical systems, which may affectation deleterious impacts for backwoods wildlife.
What the advisers begin was surprising: although Arabica aerial assemblages were added breed rich, Robusta about offered abundant biodiversity benefits, and accurate college densities of several acute aerial populations such as frugivores. In addition, farmers use beneath pesticides in the added disease-resistant Robusta farmlands.
The authors begin a absolute of 79 backwoods abased breed active in the coffee plantations they surveyed, including three IUCN Red-Listed species: Alexandrine parakeet (Psittacula eupatria), grey-headed bulbul (Pycnonotus priocephalus) and the Nilgiri copse pigeon (Columba elphinstonii). Plantations can anchorage a assortment of mammals, amphibians and timberline species, too.
The abstraction has important implications as coffee assembly is an more important disciplinarian of mural transformation, and accouterment amid altered coffee bean breed are a above ambit of agroforestry trends. The authors say that coffee acceptance efforts should accent advancement built-in awning adumbration copse to ensure that coffee landscapes can abide accouterment biodiversity benefits.
Said Dr. Karanth "Coffee farms already comedy a commutual role to adequate areas in a country like India area beneath than four percent of acreage is formally protected. Therefore, architecture partnerships with abundantly clandestine alone and accumulated acreage holders will accommodate abundant bare safe-passage and added habitats for birds and added species."
Indian robusta has almost aerial "cup scores" (i.e. acidity ratings) by coffee experts, is disease-resistant, and commands a amount premium.
Said advance columnist Charlotte Chang, who analyzed the abstracts while a alum apprentice at Princeton University and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (University of Tennessee, Knoxville): "An auspicious aftereffect of the abstraction is that coffee assembly in the Western Ghats, a all-around biodiversity hotspot, can be a win-win for birds and farmers."
Interesting research, I don't see where you link to your source for the research or the photograph though!