Forest cover contributes to yield stability of pollinator dependent crops

GONZÁLEZ CHAVES, ADRIÁN; METZGER, JEAN PAUL; CARVALHEIRO, LUÍSA ; GARIBALDI, LUCAS

New York

Congreso; 2019 Student Conference on Conservation Science - New York; 2019

American Natural History Museum

Pollination is a natural process that affects crop productivity and stability according to crop pollination dependency. The benefices of pollinators may be enhanced through landscape management, by facilitating the spill over of pollinators from source areas to crops. However, our understanding about this process is limited to local scale but we still need to upscale for larger regions. To explore this issue, we tested if landscape structure (forest and coffee cover and their configuration) can contribute to coffee productivity at the municipality level across the Atlantic forest biome in the last decade. We will use annual land use maps to calculate landscape structure metrics and socio-environmental variables (e.g. management, climatic and soil characteristics) will be taken into account as co-variables. Given that Coffea canephora has greater dependence on pollinators, we expect landscape structure to have stronger influence on Coffea canephora´s productivity when compared with Coffea arabica. We expect municipalities to be most productive at intermediate forest amount and fragmented because it facilitates pollinator spill over from forest to coffee, while minimizes the proportion of isolated coffee patches. In concordance with our expectation, we found that municipalities where more productive for landscapes with high forest edge density at intermediate forest amount surrounding coffee crops. Our work provides evidence that the coffee yields within the major production region benefits from ecosystem services provided by the Atlantic forest biome and that such depends on both coffee configuration and forest amount surround crop fields.