While we rush to get ready for work and reach for that first cup of coffee, there is a particular kind of silence inside a coffee estate in the Western Ghats.
A Malabar barbet calls from somewhere above. A drongo moves through the branches. Sunbirds flit between flowers, while insects disappear into the undergrowth. Beyond the rows of coffee, a giant squirrel may make its way across the canopy.
Coffee, after all, did not evolve to grow in open fields. It is naturally an understory plant, adapted to growing beneath taller trees.
For generations, coffee was cultivated in shaded landscapes, where the crop shared space with fruit trees, native species and other vegetation.
As coffee production intensified in many parts of the world, however, some farms shifted towards more open, sun-grown systems. Shade trees were removed to increase the amount of sunlight reaching the crop.
That decision can change far more than the amount of light reaching a coffee bush.
The farm above the coffee
For scientists studying coffee landscapes, the canopy is not simply a layer of vegetation. It can turn a plantation into a functioning agroforest.
Research by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC), which has studied shade-grown coffee for decades, shows that these farms can provide habitat for birds, mammals, insects and other wildlife. Trees can also help protect soil, support pollination and natural pest control, store carbon and regulate local microclimates.
The Smithsonian notes that coffee was traditionally grown under shade. The widespread shift towards sun plantations, however, has contributed to the loss of tropical forest habitat used by migratory birds and other wildlife.
Its researchers have therefore explored a central question: Can a coffee farm remain productive while also functioning as habitat?
This work led to the development of Bird Friendly standards, which set requirements for shade cover, tree height and tree diversity. Developed by the Smithsonian, the certification is the only coffee certification that requires coffee to be both 100 percent organic and shade-grown.
Decades of research from the Smithsonian, alongside studies from India’s Western Ghats, suggest that the answer can shape the lives of birds, insects and mammals — and potentially the health and productivity of the coffee farm itself. Photograph: (CoffeeboardI)
The principle is rooted in the structure of the canopy.
How much foliage is present? How tall are the trees? Are there different layers of vegetation? Is the farm shaded by a variety of tree species or largely by one?
These details can determine whether a coffee plantation becomes little more than a crop with trees above it, or a landscape capable of supporting life at multiple levels.
When coffee meets a biodiversity hotspot
Few places illustrate this relationship more clearly than India’s Western Ghats.
Here, coffee estates sit within and around one of the country’s most important biodiversity landscapes.
In districts such as Kodagu, plantations often lie between forest fragments, protected areas, villages and other agricultural land.
That makes them more than isolated farms.
Their canopies can support birds such as Malabar barbets, hornbills, drongos and sunbirds. Forest-dependent and threatened species, including the Nilgiri wood pigeon and Alexandrine parakeet, can also use these tree-covered landscapes.
On estates close to forests, civets, giant squirrels, porcupines and wild cats may also move through the surrounding habitat.
This does not mean a coffee estate can replace a natural forest. It cannot.
A diverse canopy creates more kinds of food, nesting sites and shelter. It can support different layers of life, from insects in the leaf litter to birds moving through the upper branches. Photograph: (Sourcedjourneys)
But in a landscape where forests are separated by farms, roads and settlements, the difference between a bare agricultural expanse and one with a connected canopy can matter.
Coffee plantations can form part of the landscape through which wildlife moves.
What happens when diversity is removed?
A 2017 study by researchers from Zurich and India examined 25 Coffea canephora, or robusta, agroforests in Kodagu. The farms ranged from diverse, multi-species systems to plantations dominated by Grevillea robusta, commonly known as silver oak.
The findings challenged the assumption that simplifying the canopy automatically produces better results for the farm.
As plantations became more dominated by a single shade-tree species, tree diversity fell sharply. But the consequences went beyond biodiversity.
Reduced tree diversity was associated with poorer coffee production and smaller bean size, while attacks by the coffee berry borer increased.
The findings were consistent across a broad rainfall gradient and across conventional, organic and irrigated management systems.
The study pointed to an important possibility: a diverse canopy is not necessarily a trade-off against farm productivity. In some cases, it may actually support it.
Trees and other vegetation can provide habitat for pollinators, support organisms involved in natural pest control, cycle nutrients and buffer farms against climatic extremes.
At the same time, researchers acknowledged the economic realities that drive farmers towards intensification.
Conservation, in other words, cannot depend on asking growers to bear the cost alone.
Not all coffee is the same
A 2018 study published in Nature examined another important shift taking place across tropical Asia: the growing dominance of robusta coffee.
Researchers compared the conservation value of arabica and robusta coffee farms in the Western Ghats. They found that arabica farms had higher habitat-specialist and functional-guild diversity and were also more profitable in the study.
Yet robusta farms could support similar, and in some cases slightly higher, abundances of habitat specialists. One reason was the presence of dense canopy cover and forest at the landscape level.
The Indian coffee plantations in the western ghats are home to a wide variety of birds #Coffeepic.twitter.com/REoXS6VOZK
— Coffee Board (@CoffeeboardI) August 18, 2017
The larger lesson was not that one coffee species is always better than another.
It was that the landscape around the coffee, and the way a farm is managed, can be as important as the crop itself.
The native-tree question
This is where the conversation around shade becomes more complicated.
A coffee plantation covered by a single fast-growing commercial tree is not ecologically identical to an agroforest containing a diverse mix of native species.
A diverse canopy creates more kinds of food, nesting sites and shelter. It can support different layers of life, from insects in the leaf litter to birds moving through the upper branches.
https://x.com/AlNature21/status/2088649785381408974?s=20
Remove that complexity and the farm may still produce coffee, but it may no longer support the same ecological relationships.
But there are limits
There are limits to what coffee landscapes can do.
Human-wildlife overlap can bring elephants, wild boars and other animals into closer contact with people, creating friction and, at times, conflict.
Plantations cannot substitute for protected forests or intact natural habitats. But they can influence what happens between those forests.
The next cup
The future of coffee is often discussed in terms of yield, price and a changing climate.
Yet there is another part of the story, visible from inside a plantation in Kodagu.
Above every coffee bush is a decision about the landscape.
Are the trees treated as competition for the crop? Or are they seen as part of the system that helps keep the farm functioning?
Decades of research from the Smithsonian, alongside studies from India’s Western Ghats, suggest that the answer can shape the lives of birds, insects and mammals — and potentially the health and productivity of the coffee farm itself.
So, the next time you take that first sip of coffee, there may be more behind it than the beans in your cup.
There may also be a forest above them.
