Biotechnology

Strategic habitat restoration can generate a win-win for forests and


Carefully planned coffee farming landscape restoration can increase farmer profits and forest cover over a 40-year period, according to a study published May 23rd in an open access journal PLOS Biology by Dr. Sophia Lopez-Cubillos at the University of Queensland in Australia, and colleagues.

Credit: Ganesh Subramaniam, Flickr (CC-BY 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

Carefully planned coffee farming landscape restoration can increase farmer profits and forest cover over a 40-year period, according to a study published May 23rd in an open access journal PLOS Biology by Dr. Sophia Lopez-Cubillos at the University of Queensland in Australia, and colleagues.

Restoring patches of natural vegetation on farms presents trade-offs for farmers: while lost cropland can reduce profitability, increased ecosystem services such as pollination can increase crop yields. To investigate how conservation priorities can be balanced with economic needs, the researchers developed a new planning framework to model the effects of forest restoration on agricultural profits, taking into account the beneficial effects of pollinators. They considered the best spatial arrangements for restoring forests to achieve one of two goals — restoring forests while expanding agriculture, or simply restoring forests — and applied this to a case study of coffee farming in Costa Rica.

They divided the study area into grids of more than 60,000 squares and estimated current coffee yield, bee abundance and profitability for each square. Calculating the profitability of coffee 5 years and 40 years down the line under various restoration scenarios, they found that strategically allocating land for agriculture and forests can increase economic returns, compared to baselines where the landscape is currently maintained. Over a 5 year period, prioritizing restoration is more profitable than a strategy that simultaneously expands agricultural land. After 40 years, strategically balancing the benefits of conservation and agriculture can increase forest cover by 20% while doubling the benefits for landowners, even when agricultural land is replaced with forest.

This study is the first to consider how long-term changes in pollinator abundance can affect the costs and benefits of forest restoration in agricultural landscapes. The results show that with careful planning, pursuing conservation goals can increase economic returns for farmers, rather than become a burden, the authors say.

López-Cubillos added, “The abundance of bees and the pollination services they provide can be increased through restoration. This study explores the trade-off between the profitability of coffee and forest restoration, finding that in five years profits increase by ~90% after restoration and forest area restored by 20%.”

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In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to papers freely available at PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002107

Quote: López-Cubillos S, McDonald-Madden E, Mayfield MM, Runting RK (2023) Optimal restoration of pollination services increases forest cover while doubling agricultural profits. PLoS Biol 21(5): e3002107. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002107

Author’s Country: Australia

Funding: see script




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