Abstract

ESCOBAR-ANLEU, Bárbara Isabela; SOTO-SHOENDER, José Roberto; RIVAS-ROMERO, Javier Antípatro  and  MONTES, Nancy. 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. Acta Zool. Mex [online]. 2023, vol.39, e2570.  Epub May 02, 2023. ISSN 2448-8445.  https://doi.org/10.21829/azm.2023.3912570.

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.

Keywords : agroforestry; bayesian hierarchical abundance model; camera trapping; Central America; private reserves; shade-grown coffee management.

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