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.
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
