Hybrid coffee cultivars may enhance agroecosystem resilience to climate change

Anthropogenic climate change is predicted to cause shifts in temperature and precipitation patterns that will be detrimental for global agriculture. Developing comprehensive strategies for building climate resilient agroecosystems is critical for maintaining future crop production. Arabica coffee (Coffea arabica) is highly sensitive to the quantity and timing of precipitation, so alterations in precipitation patterns that are predicted under climate change are likely to be a major challenge for maintaining coffee agroecosystems. We assessed cultivar selection as a potential component of more resilient coffee agroecosystems by evaluating water stress responses among five Arabica coffee cultivars (clonal hybrids H10 and H1 and seedling lines Catuai 44, Catuai, and Villa Sarchi) using a precipitation reduction experiment in the highlands of Tarrazú, Costa Rica. During the first harvest (eighteen months after planting), plants under the rainout treatment had 211 % greater total fruit weight and over 50 % greater biomass than under the control treatment, potentially due to protection from unusually high rainfall during this period of our experiment. At the second harvest (30 months after planting), after a year of more typical rainfall, plants under rainout still produced 66 % more fruit by weight than under control. The magnitude of the responses varied among cultivars where, at the first harvest, H10 and H1 had approximately 92 % and 81 % greater fruit production and 18 % and 22 % greater biomass, respectively, and at the second harvest H10 had 60 % more fruit production than the overall average. Thus, our findings suggest that the hybrid lines H10 and H1 are more resilient than the other cultivars to the stress of high soil moisture. Overall, our results indicate that stress due to higher than average rainfall could impair coffee plant growth and production, and that cultivar selection is likely to be an important tool for maintaining the viability of coffee production, and the resilience of global agroecosystems more generally, under climate change.