Bird communities in sun and shade coffee farms in Kenya

Agricultural expansion to meet rising demands for crops is one of the greatest threats to terrestrial biodiversity. Coffee, one of the most valuable trade items in tropical countries, provides economic livelihood and habitat for wildlife, especially when it is grown under a canopy of shade trees. In the Neotropics, birds are well studied in coffee, where they usually are more abundant and diverse in shaded farms. However, large differences in abundance between nearby study locations suggest these differences are regionally specific. Few studies have been done in coffee in Africa, which comprises 20% of the world's area of coffee cultivation. I studied differences in the bird communities between sun and shade coffee in central Kenya, and examined effects of vegetation and landscape on bird abundance and diversity. Sun coffee had higher species richness and abundance of all major guilds (omnivores, insectivores, and granivores), and showed low community similarity to shade. Unlike findings from the Neotropics, canopy cover appeared to have a negative influence on all guilds, while understory volume of weeds increased bird abundance and species richness with a similar magnitude as canopy cover. Forest fragment size, distance from fragment edges, and proportions of landscape cover at a 250 m scale did not strongly affect bird communities in sun coffee. These differences highlight the need for further studies of the effects of coffee cultivation on bird abundance and diversity in Africa.