Research project The relationship between climate, biodiversity, coffee diseases and yield

A fair share of all our science depends on coffee. It also provides employment to a whopping 125 million people across the world, including many farmers in developing countries. In this project, we employ our insights in climate, biodiversity, pests and diseases for an applied aim: a sustainable and diverse agroforestry system for coffee. Where sustainable refers both to the conservation of biodiversity and a stable income for the smallholder farmer. Our studies take place within the area of origin of Arabica coffee, and our permanent field sites span the range from coffee growing under the natural forest canopy to more intensively managed plantation coffee. Our main focus is on coffee genetic diversity, metabolomics, multi-year pest and disease dynamics, plant diversity and the social and economic conditions of the smallholder farmers. More recently, we placed hundreds of dataloggers to investigate the impact of climate on coffee diseases and crop yield, and the potential for farmers to mitigate or adapt to climate change.

The project started 2015 and will go on until retirement.