A new study finds that coffee pulp, a waste product of coffee production, can be used to speed up tropical forest recovery on post agricultural land.

Forests on caffeine: coffee waste can boost forest recovery

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2021-05-25 23:00:06

A new study finds that coffee pulp, a waste product of coffee production, can be used to speed up tropical forest recovery on post agricultural land. The findings are published in the British Ecological Society journal  Ecological Solutions and Evidence.  

In the study, researchers from ETH-Zurich and the  University of Hawai` i  spread 3 0  dump truck loads of coffee pulp on a 35 × 40m area of degraded land in Costa Rica and marked out a similar size d  area without coffee pulp as a control.  

“ The results were dramatic . ” said Dr Rebecca Cole, lead author of the study. “The area treated with a thick layer of coffee pulp turned into a small forest in only two years while the control plot remained dominated by non-native pasture grasses.”  

After only two years the coffee pulp treated area had 80% canopy cover compared to 20% in the control area. The canopy in the coffee pulp area was also four times taller than that of the control area.  

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