Ecologists 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.

The expectation by Perfecto and Vandermeer going into the Hurricane Maria study was that shade trees would act as windbreaks and that damage to coffee plants would be less severe in these «agroforestry systems» than at farms without trees.

While most of the Puerto Rican coffee farms did lose a great deal of shade cover — an average of 37.5% canopy loss — there was «no relationship» between the amount of shade on a farm and damage to its coffee plants, the researchers report in a study scheduled for publication Oct. 30 in Scientific Reports, a Nature journal.

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