Agroforestry systems provide opportunities to reduce the trade-off between agricultural production and biodiversity, for example by enhancing a diverse community of species potentially acting as natural pest control agents. While management of agroforestry systems is intensifying across the globe,...

Shade trees are used in many coffee production systems across the globe. Beyond the benefits on biodiversity conservation, climate buffering, carbon sequestration and pathogen regulation, shade trees can impact the soil nutrient status via, for instance, litter inputs and nitrogen fixation. Since...

Banana-coffee systems in eastern DR Congo, which occupy the mid- and high-altitude undulating production landscapes, are over 60 years old, whereas banana-cacao sytems are more recent. Bananas provide shade for the young and mature coffee plants, and young cacao trees, while some annual crops, such ...

The attainment of ever more sustainable agricultural production and reconciling agriculture with conservation are the main challenges that human beings are confronted with head-on in the future. Through expanding and enhancing agroforestry homegardens at the agricultural landscape level,...

Commercialization of agriculture is an important part of the agrarian transformation of low-income economies and a means of ensuring food security, enhanced nutrition, and incomes. This study was designed to examine coffee commercialization in the coffee-based farming system of Ethiopia. It was...

Agroforestry systems are thought to reconcile biodiversity protection with food production and as a means of climate change adaptation and mitigation options. The contribution of a coffee-based agroforestry system to tree diversity and carbon stock along altitudinal gradients in western Ethiopia...

The coffee plant (Coffea arabica L.) is thought to have begun as an understory tree species in Ethiopia's northeastern high rain forests. Bananas (Musa spp.) are commonly intercropped with coffee to provide shade as well as food and money. However, the effect of this practice on coffee production...

Coffee forests are the most valuable land-use systems that provide multiple benefits such as biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration and source of income. This study aimed to estimate the carbon stock of coffee agroforestry systems and the contribution of coffee plants (Coffea arabica L.)...

Ethiopian Arabica coffee is produced in different agroforestry systems which differ in forest management intensity. In forest coffee systems (FC), coffee shrubs grow naturally in the understory of Afromontane forests with little human intervention, whereas in semi-forest coffee systems (SFC)...

Monocropping of perennial cash crops providing livelihood for smallholders is replacing native forest throughout the tropics, but there is no direct empirical evidence on the impact on soil organic carbon (SOC) and nitrogen (N) relative to multistrata-agroforestry-based cash cropping. In...