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Do we want to work to protect biodiversity or do we just want to say that we measured it?
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Roberto, who owned the coffee farm where we were living and doing research, told us to put a camera trap along the pathway near the forest outside the coffee farm and we would get a picture of a puma.

I tried to explain to him that it was not that easy. Once you set up a wildlife camera, you often have to wait weeks to even see the tip of the tail of an animal. The camera usually has to be repositioned at least a few times because the angle is not right. You check the SIM card daily, deleting the hundreds of pictures of leaves that fall or branches that sway in the breeze and set off the motion detector causing the camera to snap a picture. What are the chances that you just randomly set up a camera and any animal, much less a puma, happens to walk by within the camera frame? But I humored him. Team morale was low – our field research had hit a few roadblocks, and we needed a distraction. So we drove out in the Jeep right before dinner and set up a camera trap along the pathway as instructed.

The next morning, Roberto asked, “Did you get a picture of the puma?” Again, I tempered his expectations, but told him we would go and check the camera that morning. When we looked at the images from the night before, lo and behold, there was the puma sauntering along the pathway.

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Everyone has their own how-did-you-get-into-coffee story. Mine was through wildlife conservation. Coffee is grown in some of the most beautiful and biodiverse places on the planet. Through my work on coffee farms, I have seen tiny mouse opossums with bat-like ears and prehensile tails that wrap around your finger when you measure them, bright blue morpho butterflies the size of your hand, coral snakes nicknamed the “15-minute snake” because that is how long you have to get to the hospital before you die if bitten, endangered tapirs wading through streams, tons of birds and bats, and of course, the aforementioned puma.

Recently, a roaster posed this question to me: Do the coffee farms that we are sourcing from help or hurt biodiversity? This is a great question – simple and straightforward, but it does not have a simple straightforward answer. And it has been bothering me ever since she asked it – particularly because biodiversity has been my main area of research. I have spent years on coffee farms assessing biodiversity.

As a tropical crop, coffee is grown in regions that host high levels of biodiversity. Coffee farms can play an important role in biodiversity conservation and preservation – providing habitat or corridors that connect areas of native forest.

If you look at a map of global biodiversity hot spots, you will see that the hot spots overlap with coffee landscapes. However, this does not mean that every coffee farm in that area has high levels of biodiversity.

Farms are managed differently. Some farms almost mimic native forests. The ground is often covered by herbaceous plants, keeping the soil moist and protected, giving off an earthy, grassy scent. Vines often crisscross the tree branches above with dappled light peeking through the canopy cover to the ground below. Calls of birds and insects can be heard and if you’re lucky you might see the tail of a fox or coati or civet cat, depending on where you are in the world. These farms are complex, living ecosystems that can provide habitat for wildlife, nutrients for the soil, pest management, carbon sequestration, and pollination.

On the complete opposite spectrum, some farms are monocultures of coffee plants with no shade trees. These sun coffee farms, as they are called, make for beautiful open landscapes, but often the sun-scorched earth is cracked and dry.

Being in these farms can feel as if you’re in a desert, with nowhere to escape from the hot sun, no trees to provide shade, nutrients or habitat. Sun coffee systems are also called intensively managed or technified farms because the coffee plants must externally be provided with what they are lacking from the environment, resulting in increased uses of agrochemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides.

There are many factors that can influence biodiversity on farms, like types of agrochemicals used, species of trees, amount of ground cover, amounts of flowering plants and trees, but just because you have nice habitat on the farm, doesn’t necessarily mean that wildlife will be there.

Biodiversity also is impacted by what is adjacent to the farm, like nearby development, busy roadways, native forests or rivers and by other factors like invasive species, weather patterns, elevation, or season. Publicly available regional maps with layers like biodiversity hot spots, conservation areas, and areas of biological significance are great ways to get an idea of biodiversity potential in an area, but biodiversity is site specific.

You need to be on the ground, on the farm to measure it. For my previous research, we spent a minimum of three months on each farm – setting up live traps, camera traps and other methods to survey the types of animals living on the farm and taking tons of measurements of all the trees and vegetation there. That type of extensive work is possible for a research study where you are assessing a handful of farms, but what can you do when you source from hundreds of thousands of farms?

I think this is the question that a lot of us are grappling with. As conscientious industry stakeholders are becoming more interested in biodiversity and information about biodiversity impacts is being requested for compliance and reporting, it is a topic that is increasingly front of mind in the coffee industry, and rightly so.

We are wiping out species faster than we can even count how many different species exist(ed). Human activities such as development, deforestation, and agricultural expansion are taking away suitable habitat from wildlife, leaving them stranded on fragmented areas that are isolated and often don’t have all the resources they need. Biodiversity loss is a real issue and understanding our impact across the supply chain is an important starting point.

But I must say, some of what I’m seeing now to address this question is concerning. It seems that people are just using metrics that can be measured – but those metrics don’t really tell us much about biodiversity.

Our sustainability team was given a presentation on biodiversity that showed graphs of “increased richness” (richness typically means # of species) due to their restoration project, but when we asked increased richness of what? Does that mean more wildlife species? Or tree species? Or insects? Or microbes? The answer was no – it is the increase in vegetation nitrogen content of trees. Is this actually useful? Not really – but it can be measured via satellite remotely and quantified. Hmmm… Or does it matter that there is water scarcity or financial inequities in the region? Yes, these are important, but are they an indicator of biodiversity? Tangentially perhaps, but not really. However, we can measure it, so it goes in the pot.

Can we say, the coffee farm is adjacent to forest, therefore it has high biodiversity? Again, no (unfortunately). What if the farm uses a ton of inorganic chemicals? Then the farm can actually negatively impact the biodiversity of the forest.

It is a tough one. All these attempts at measuring biodiversity remotely are well-meaning. I definitely don’t have answers, but I feel like I know the questions to ask.

I’m not sure that we can boil down such complex ecosystems to a handful of metrics that you can find in a database. I’m afraid that we will continue on this path of just measuring things that can be measured so that we can include them in a report, but that don’t have any real meaning when it comes to biodiversity. Protecting biodiversity is important and I don’t want to see it get swept up into a box ticking exercise.

It has always amazed me that coffee farms can be refuges for wildlife and protect biodiversity and that coffee can be grown under shade trees and vegetation that support biodiversity. There are not many agricultural landscapes that can claim that.

I think what we can do is support coffee farms and projects that work to enhance healthy ecosystems and landscapes which also protect and improve biodiversity, even if we don’t have a number on it. While we are still exploring and wrestling with the topic of biodiversity and coffee, we do have a much better understanding of emissions and coffee. At Falcon, we recently wrapped up a two and half year joint project with the University of Brighton to figure out how to measure greenhouse gas emissions on coffee farms.

Through our emissions research and pilot study, we have learned what the main contributors are for emissions in coffee production and their impact on the carbon footprint. We are working on an interactive, illustrative tool to share some of our findings from the emissions project. Stay tuned for more information about that soon!

Author: Dr Mandi Caudill is leading the Coffee Carbon Project at Falcon to identify and implement methodologies for measuring and mitigating carbon emissions in the coffee supply chain.