Conservation Letters , a new journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, has recently published a study on Ethiopian coffee cultivation and its impact on bird and forest conservation. Birds, forest, coffee and Ethiopia are things that keep me busy on a daily basis, as you could read here before.

Aaron Gove and his colleagues (link via DOI) report that coffee cultivation has a positive effect on bird species diversity in open farmland, by retaining forest trees in the landscape, and a negative effect on bird species diversity in the forests, by reducing the diversity of tree and shrub species and structure in the forest fragments. Thus, at first sight one is likely to condemn coffee cultivation in forest fragments because it may lead to local extinction of forest birds species, some of which are endemic to the Abyssinian highlands. But were it not for the coffee, the fragments would probably have been converted to other forms of more open agriculture already a long time ago, with even worse consequences for forest birds, as I have observed and reported for Tigray. Thus, it is difficult to assess the ecological sustainability of coffee cultivation in southern Ethiopia – it’s good for birds outside the forest, but bad for birds in the forest… The authors aptly conclude that the emerging coffee certification schemes, such as Bird Friendly and Rainforest Alliance (with the help of a Belgium-based sustainable coffee trading house, ed.), will need to take this complexity into account.

Wild coffee, Belete forest, Ethiopia