EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

Tea vs. Wildlife

Tea Plantation, Thyolo Mountain, Zomba Plateau
Malawi, Africa

Explanation:  Tea and wildlife usually don't mix.

More precisely, when landscapes get converted to extensive tea plantations -- a lucrative and important part of some regional economies -- local wildlife often become excluded and lose habitat.

For example, in one study, large-scale tea plantations and intensive small-scale agriculture caused isolation and fragmentation of wetland and forest patches at Kibale National Park in Uganda.  The productivity of the remaining wetland and forest patches continues to decline (Hartter and Southworth 2009).  

However, wildlife conservation and tea production need not be at odds.  I have observed in northwest India how some wildlife -- including birds and some species of owls -- can persist in small patches of tall, old trees left amidst tea fields.  And in tea plantations of northern India, I saw how blossom-headed parakeets, spotted owlets, and Indian white-backed vultures could roost or even nest in residual, overstory trees scattered individually across the fields.   

Often wildlife can inhabit the edges and fringes of forests along the boundaries of tea plantations, where bird watching often is good.  
 

Patches of forest in a sea of tea can provide much-needed habitat
for many wildlife species.  In some cases, such forest patches
also provide important cultural functions, such as with spirit groves.
 

Some wildlife species will still cross through tea plantations to reach cover on the other side, such as leopards, tigers, and other large mammals.  Providing some small avenues of cover within the plantations -- perhaps such as is done with conservation of hedgerows in agricultural landscapes of England -- could provide much needed dispersal habitat or even breeding cover for smaller species such as birds.  And tea plantations that become abandoned, or when owners sell, could signal a great opportunity to restore at least portions of the landscape used by wide-ranging wildlife for dispersal corridors.  

Information:
     Hartter, J., and J. Southworth. 2009. Dwindling resources and fragmentation of landscapes around parks: wetlands and forest patches around Kibale National Park, Uganda. Landscape Ecology 24(5):643-656.