University of Michigan ecologists Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer have studied Latin American coffee farms for a quarter century, and they tracked the recovery of tropical forests in Nicaragua following 1988’s Hurricane Joan for nearly 20 years.
So, when Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm in September 2017, Perfecto and Vandermeer had certain expectations about the types and extent of damages the storm would inflict on the coffee industry, long a backbone of the island’s agricultural sector.
But when they analyzed data collected at 28 Puerto Rican coffee farms less than a year after Maria and compared it to 2013 data from the same farms, many of those expectations flew right out the window.
One of the biggest surprises: There was no link between the amount of shade on a coffee farm—a key measure of management intensity—and damage from the hurricane.
Read more at University of Michigan
Image: In July 2018, U-M doctoral student Zachary Hajian-Forooshani and U-M ecologist John Vandermeer survey a Puerto Rican coffee farm damaged less than a year earlier by Hurricane Maria. Image credit: Levi Stroud/U-M College of LSA