Seeds Rescued From India’s Coffee Farms Could Help Forest Restoration

Coffee agroforests in India’s Western Ghats mountains, where coffee shrubs are grown under the shade of trees, could be a good source of seeds for forest restoration efforts, according to a recent study, reports Mongabay India’s Simrin Sirur.

Much of India’s coffee is grown in the rain-rich Western Ghats, a global biodiversity hotspot. Coffee farms have fragmented the region’s tropical forests, but many plantation owners intentionally grow coffee under the shade of a rich variety of native trees. Seeds of these trees, typically cleared by farmers during canopy pruning, can instead be “rescued” and cultivated in nurseries for forest restoration projects, researchers found.

“In the past, some of those seeds might have survived and those trees might have grown, but today they’re getting slashed because farmers do not want trees growing in places that will compromise the productivity of their crop,” Anand Osuri, the study’s lead author and a scientist with the nonprofit Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), told Sirur. “The act of removing those seeds and seedlings is a form of rescue.”