Project Monitoring

The Café Selva Norte (CSN) project is located in the Amazonas and Cajamarca regions in north of Peru, with a total potential area of thousands of hectares. The Project area includes a set of dispersed coffee producers’ properties in the mountainous region known as “selva alta” where coffee is mainly produced between 1200 and 1800 meters above sea level. The project area is one of the three main coffee production zones in Peru and is recognized for the quality of its production. The CSN project, managed by the Ecotierra, includes to date 340 small coffee farmers located in the Amazonas and Cajamarca regions of northern Peru. Each of the 340 farmers represents an investment site (mean =1.10 ha), as defined in the LDN Fund Impact Monitoring Methodology.

Figure 1: Café Selva Norte Project in Northern Peru is comprised of 340 individual investment sites (black dots on the map). The investment area is the aggregate of all those 340 sites. The investment landscape, in this case, has been defined as the area within a 2 km buffer around the investment area.

The Café Selva Norte LDN baseline found that:

• Land productivity: 4.1 % of the investment area is currently identified as degraded compared to 4.8 % within the larger investment landscape
• Land cover: 86.3 % of the investment area, within the representative area assessed, is currently covered by woody vegetation (55.0 % tree covered and 31.3 % shrubland) as compared to 78.0 % in the investment landscape (47.1 % tree covered and 30.9 % shrubland).
• Soil organic carbon: Baseline SOC content within the first 30 cm of the soil was 109.7 tons C/ha in fallow sites, 97.9 tons C/ha in sun grown coffee, and 103.3 tons C/ha in shade grown coffee.

Figure 2: Baseline map for land productivity (left), land cover (middle), and sampling design for the soil organic carbon baseline (right) of Café Selva Norte investments in Peru.

The proposed monitoring plan following the LDN Fund Impact Monitoring Methodology is:

• Land productivity: Wall to wall annual assessment using remote sensing data
• Land cover: Every 4 years repeated measures of land cover change within the same representative area used for baseline and using very high spatial resolution data. If wall to wall 30 m resolution products can be obtained or produced for the full investment landscape, those could complement the results obtained from the very high-resolution data.
• Soil organic carbon: Initial and final SOC measurements with in the same representative area used for the baseline and following the same cluster design. Annually, coffee production measures can be used to assess changes in productive capacity of the soil and impact of ongoing agricultural practices.

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