Supporting Rural Livelihoods and Ecosystem Services Conservation in the Pico Duarte Coffee Region of the Dominican Republic

Abstract

Successful conservation strategies have increasingly looked beyond bounded protected areas and toward integrated landscape approaches that conserve biodiversity while maintaining ecosystem services that benefit human communities and food production. More integrated approaches to conservation are particularly timely in agricultural landscapes, where individual farm-level choices can play a significant role in the management of habitat provisioning, nutrient cycling, recreation amenities, carbon sequestration, and the delivery of clean water. This study presents results of an interdisciplinary analysis with shade coffee farmers in the Pico Duarte region of the Dominican Republic. Findings suggest that small farms, as part of a diversified livelihood strategy, maintain a diverse tree canopy, which supports soil conservation and important watershed services. However, high poverty levels and strong economic pressures to convert to high-input, monoculture crops are threatening native tree species biodiversity and the provisioning of ecosystem services (e.g., delivery of clean water and carbon sequestration) to local beneficiaries, as well as to national and international actors. A coordinated effort to support smallholder shade coffee farmers across the landscape through agricultural extension, capacity building, and other market-and-non-market-based interventions offer the potential to improve rural livelihoods and ecosystem services conservation over the long-term.

KEYWORDS:

• rural livelihoods
• ecosystem services
• integrated landscape approaches
• coffee, Dominican Republic

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the farmers of the ASCAJA coffee cooperative of Jarabacoa. Secondly, the authors thank the staff of the Instituto Dominicano de Investigaciones Agropecuarias y Forestales (IDIAF) and the many volunteers at Finca Alta Gracia who assisted with fieldwork. They are also grateful to the Vermont Coffee Company, including Paul Ralston, Bill Eichner, and Julia Alvarez. This work was completed as part of L. H. Gross’ master’s thesis for the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont.