Response of Coffee Farms to Hurricane Maria: Resistance and Resilience from an Extreme Climatic Event

• Published in: Scientific reports 2019-10, Vol.9 (1), p.15668-11, Article 15668
• Main Authors: Perfecto, Ivette, Hajian-Forooshani, Zachary, Iverson, Aaron, Irizarry, Amarilys D., Lugo-Perez, Javier, Medina, Nicholas, Vaidya, Chatura, White, Alexa, Vandermeer, John
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 631/158/2165; 631/158/2456; Agricultural ecosystems; Agricultural industry; Climate change; Coffee; Farming systems; Farms; Humanities and Social Sciences; Hurricanes; multidisciplinary; Science; Science (multidisciplinary)
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-51416-1

Resistance and resilience have become important concepts in the evaluation of disturbance events, providing a framework that is useful in light of the expected increase in frequency and occurrences of hurricanes as a consequence of climate change. Hurricane Maria landed on Puerto Rico as a category 4 storm in September of 2017. Among the affected elements were agricultural systems, including coffee agroecosystems. Historically, coffee has been a major backbone of the island’s agricultural sector. Grown with a range of management styles, the coffee agroecosystem provides an excellent model system to study the resistance/resilience of agroecosystems faced with hurricane disturbance. Sampling 28 farms and comparing pre-hurricane data (2013) with post hurricane data we find that management style had only a small effect on either resistance or resilience, likely due to the especially strong nature of the storm. Rather, the socio-political context of individual farms seems to be a more useful predictor of resilience.