Coffee agroforests in India’s Western Ghats mountains, where coffee shrubs are grown under the shade of trees, could be a good source of seeds for forest restoration efforts, according to a recent study, reports Mongabay India’s Simrin Sirur. Much of India’s coffee is grown in the rain-rich Western Ghats, a global biodiversity hotspot. Coffee farms have fragmented the region’s tropical forests, but many plantation owners intentionally grow coffee under the shade of a rich variety of native trees. Seeds of these trees, typically cleared by farmers during canopy pruning, can instead be “rescued” and cultivated in nurseries for forest restoration projects, researchers found. “In the past, some of those seeds might have survived and those trees might have grown, but today they’re getting slashed because farmers do not want trees growing in places that will compromise the productivity of their crop,” Anand Osuri, the study’s lead author and a scientist with the nonprofit Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), told Sirur. “The act of removing those seeds and seedlings is a form of rescue.” To test the viability of seed collection from coffee agroforests, Osuri and his colleagues at NCF collaborated with coffee growers in the Western Ghats of Karnataka state. They surveyed eight agroforests and recorded 3,755 trees from 102 species. In fact, “the numbers of restoration-relevant and conservation priority species recorded in coffee were considerably higher than those available in local public nurseries operated by the forest administration, which are the main suppliers of trees in the project area and…This article was originally published on Mongabay