Assessing Wild Coffee Conservation during Community Forest Management in Southwest Ethiopia

Abstract:

One of the two remaining blocks of Afromontane forests in Ethiopia is found in the southwest highlands of the country. This area is known for being the origin of Arabica coffee and, more importantly, one of the few places in Ethiopia where Arabica coffee still grows wild in the natural forest. Conserving wild coffee in situ in the wild, especially in southwest Ethiopia, is necessary for securing the diversity and integrity of the Arabica coffee gene pool. However, the extinction risk to wild coffee is real due to forest loss and climate change affecting lower altitude sites where some wild coffee is found.

In order to address this challenge a five-year community forest management project (CFM) was designed to preserve the natural forest and the wild coffee stock within Sheko District in southwest Ethiopia. Already published results have shown that CFM can help to reduce the rate of loss of natural forest and almost halt it. However, the effect of CFM on the wild coffee in the natural forest had not been assessed in the previous study.

Here we focus on an assessment of the stock of wild coffee bushes in the natural forest, and to what extent CFM has been able to maintain the wild coffee. A baseline survey undertaken in 2015 was revisited in 2019 and the analysed data used to determine whether wild coffee bushes were preserved and how forest cover at the wild coffee sites had changed during the CFM period. We examined the changes that occurred in the number of wild coffee mother trees and saplings for the matching sites between 2015 and 2019 as well as changes in forest cover seen by satellite imagery. We will present whether and how CFM can help achieve such specific biodiversity conservation.