Abstract
Food production depends on biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES) such as pest control and pollination. Our knowledge about biodiversity benefits to crop production has increased in recent decades, but most studies treat ES separately and then add up their values. Ignoring that these services, being part of the same system, likely interact is blinding us to potential synergies and trade-offs. Our field experiment shows, at realistic field scales, that pest control and pollination can interact positively. This synergy translates directly to improved yields and income for coffee farmers, who produce a global commodity worth $24 billion per year. Our findings highlight the need to study interactions to understand the linkages between biodiversity, ES, and farmers’ livelihoods.
Biodiversity-mediated ecosystem services (ES) support human well-being, but their values are typically estimated individually. Although ES are part of complex socioecological systems, we know surprisingly little about how multiple ES interact ecologically and economically. Interactions could be positive (synergy), negative (trade-offs), or absent (additive effects), with strong implications for management and valuation. Here, we evaluate the interactions of two ES, pollination and pest control, via a factorial field experiment in 30 Costa Rican coffee farms. We found synergistic interactions between these two critical ES to crop production. The combined positive effects of birds and bees on fruit set, fruit weight, and fruit weight uniformity were greater than their individual effects. This represents experimental evidence at realistic farm scales of positive interactions among ES in agricultural systems. These synergies suggest that assessments of individual ES may underestimate the benefits biodiversity provides to agriculture and human well-being. Using our experimental results, we demonstrate that bird pest control and bee pollination services translate directly into monetary benefits to coffee farmers. Excluding both birds and bees resulted in an average yield reduction of 24.7% (equivalent to losing US$1,066.00/ha). These findings highlight that habitat enhancements to support native biodiversity can have multiple benefits for coffee, a valuable crop that supports rural livelihoods worldwide. Accounting for potential interactions among ES is essential to quantifying their combined ecological and economic value.
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