More trees with your coffee? Diversity and habitat associations of terrestrial medium- and large-sized mammals in shade-grown coffee plantations of the highlands of Guatemala

Abstract Agricultural practices can have detrimental impacts on biodiversity, but some studies have shown the benefits of agroforestry practices like shade-grown coffee to bird communities and, to a lesser extent, to mammal communities. To better understand whether shade-grown coffee plantations can contribute to the conservation of mammal communities, we deployed camera traps in private reserves with a matrix of shade-grown coffee plantations and forest in the highlands of Guatemala. At each reserve we estimated species richness of terrestrial medium- and large-sized mammals. We also estimated mammal relative abundance and occupancy probabilities as proxies for mammalian habitat associations and evaluated how these were affected by key landscape features (e.g., land-use type, asphalt roads, and distance to protected areas). We used hierarchical multi-species Bayesian abundance models that account for imperfect detection to estimate our parameters of interest and model the influence of landscape features on site-level species richness and species relative abundance. We detected 14 species across all reserves and found a strong influence of land use and presence of asphalt roads on mammalian relative abundances and species richness. More species used areas around the camera traps in forest than in shade-grown coffee plantations and far from asphalt roads. Our study shows that reserves with shade-grown coffee plantations can harbor terrestrial mammalian communities of conservation interest. Our results also suggest that to maintain mammalian diversity and abundances in our study area, shade-grown coffee crops should be mixed in with natural forests and the presence of asphalt roads within these should be avoided or minimized.

Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	Escobar-Anleu,Bárbara Isabela, Soto-Shoender,José Roberto, Rivas-Romero,Javier Antípatro, Montes,Nancy
Format:	Digital revista
Language:	English
Published:	Instituto de Ecología A.C. 2023
Online Access:	http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0065-17372023000100106
Tags:	Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!