Newly-published research by Shalene Jha and Christopher W. Dick indicates that traditional shade-grown coffee farms provide yet another ecosystem service: maintenance of genetic diversity of trees in the landscape. The paper studies Miconia affinis in Chiapas state, Mexico. The inference is that natural seed dispersers (birds and bats), harbored by shade-grown plantations, promote the needed gene flow, and that the farms knit together fragmented forest patches.
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