The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Coffee estates favoured as buffer zones for wildlife conservation

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Nov 12, 2007
ePaper

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Coffee estates favoured as buffer zones for wildlife conservation

Alladi Jayasri

Study in 15 coffee plantations records 28 species of mammals
A rich pool of mammal species make use of the coffee estates

BANGALORE: Forest reserves are increasingly becoming patches embedded in a matrix of human-altered habitats — plantations, agricultural fields and pastures. In the tropics, coffee plantations which are run using ecologically sustainable methods can form effective buffer zones around protected areas, and provide corridors for many wildlife species that require connectivity between forests.

A study of mammalian communities in 15 coffee plantations around the Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary in the Western Ghats (near Chikmagalur district) recorded 28 species of mammals during six months from December 2005 to May 2006.

Archana Bali, then in a master’s programme in wildlife biology conservation, at National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), whose paper was published recently in the journal Biological Conservation, estimated mammal species richness and abundance using indirect evidence in belt transects and track plots, and from sightings during night surveys.

Plantations of coffee, tea, cardamom and teak have caused extensive fragmentation of habitat, and their extent of about 3,300 sq. km is approximately 25 per cent of the total protected area network in the Western Ghats.

Indian coffee is traditionally under shade comprising native forest tree species. Several ecological scientists have shown that such traditional agricultural practices are compatible with conservation of native biodiversity.

But, as Ms Bali’s study notes, in the last few decades, coffee planters in India have started shading coffee with silver oak, an exotic timber producing tree from Australia, since it is fast growing, and fetches about $ 700 per cubic metre of timber, providing an additional source of income against the fluctuations of coffee prices.

Conversion to monoculture has seen to cause loss of biodiversity in other coffee growing regions of the world, and Ms. Bali’s study throws up possibilities that it might be the same case in the Western Ghats. It goes on to look at how coffee estates can be co-opted into conservation of the protected areas, on the hypothesis that mammalian communities in coffee plantations would depend on their proximity to the protected area, vegetation characteristics, and in particular, the extent of silver oak.

At least 28 species of mammals were detected in the 15 estates. These include the bonnet macaque, common langur, sambar, mouse deer, Indian muntjac, spotted deer, gaur, and wild pig, a solitary sighting of an elephant, sloth bear, jackal, dhole, tiger, common leopard, small cats, civets, Indian giant squirrel, jungle striped squirrel, and two other squirrel species.

The study has shown that a rich pool of mammal species make use of the coffee estates. The estates closer to the Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary had greater diversity of mammal species. Planters must be made partners in the initiative to conserve this biodiversity, says Ajith Kumar, of Wildlife Conservation Society (India Programme) who directs the master’s programme and is a co-author. Jagdish Krishnaswamy, of Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment is another co-author of the paper.

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