Abstract
Context: Shade coffee plantations are purported to maintain forest biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. Understanding their conservation importance is hindered, however, by the limited taxa studied and failure to account for the landscape context of plantations and quality of reference sites.Objectives/Research questions: (1) how occupancy of mammals and birds changed from continuous forest to fragmented forest and coffee plantations while statistically controlling for landscape context, and (2) whether mammal and bird communities responded differently to shade coffee with regard to richness and composition.Methods: We used camera traps to sample ground-dwelling birds and medium- and large-bodied mammals (31 and 29 species, respectively) in shade coffee plantations and two types of reference forest (fragmented and continuous) in Colombia’s Western Andes. We used a multi-species occupancy model to correct for detection and to estimate occupancy, richness, and community composition.Results Shade coffee lacked ~50% of the species found in continuous forest, primarily forest-specialist insectivorous birds and forest-specialist and large-bodied mammals, resulting in different species composition between coffee and forest assemblages. Coffee plantation birds were generally a unique subset of disturbance-adapted specialists, whereas mammals in coffee were mostly generalists encountered across land uses. Forest fragments had species richness more similar to shade coffee than to continuous forest. Species sensitive to shade coffee responded negatively to isolation and disturbance at the landscape scale.Conclusions: Studies comparing coffee with relictual forest fragments may overestimate the conservation value of shade coffee. Conservation of biodiversity in shade coffee landscapes will be ineffective unless these efforts are linked to larger landscape-level conservation initiatives.
The persistence of ant-following birds in small amazonian forest fragments
