Study: Bird-Friendly Coffee Landscapes Need Forest Alongside Shade
Daily Coffee News Staff| August 4, 2026 Shade-grown coffee has long been promoted as a key means of protecting bird diversity in tropical coffee regions. A new study from the Colombian Andes complicates that picture, finding that the amount of intact forest near farms may be just as critical to bird conservation. One practical implication for the coffee sector may ultimately be the study’s influence on third-party environmental certifications and conservation planning. The research was led by ecologists withSELVAwith co-authors from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, which administersSmithsonian Bird Friendly, the coffee industry’s most rigorous third-party standards for shade-grown coffee. The certification currently requires 40% canopy cover, 10 different shade tree species per hectare and organic certification, which aligns with the study’s recommended thresholds. The new study’s modeled thresholds partly overlap with those standards, while also suggesting that stronger local shade and tree-diversity requirements may be needed where surrounding forest cover is lower. Inside the Study In the new study, published in the June issue of theJournal of Applied Ecology, researchers tracked bird communities across sun coffee, shade-grown coffee and forest habitats in Cundinamarca Department in Colombia’s Eastern Andes. Researchers sorted the birds into habitat “guilds,” including forest specialists, generalists and open area specialists, as well as diet guilds including frugivores, insectivores, granivores, nectarivores and omnivores. They also tracked species of conservation concern and Neotropical-Nearctic migratory birds. The key finding was that forest cover within a 2-kilometer radius positively predicted bird occupancy among each of those guilds, across coffee and forest habitats and in both seasons surveyed. Forest specialists were the most sensitive. They required forest habitat with more than 32% forest cover within a 2-kilometer radius to reach median occupancy. The paper found forest specialists were nearly absent from coffee farms, while generalists were more flexible but still responded
Daily Coffee News Staff| August 4, 2026 Shade-grown coffee has long been promoted as a key means of protecting bird diversity in tropical coffee regions.
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