preprint · bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
An analysis of survey data from 474 cocoa farms across 103 localities in Côte d’Ivoire examined tree diversity and composition across three major production zones. Using modern ecological metrics and statistical methods, the research revealed significant regional differences in tree species richness and composition. Farms in the Centre and Centre-West region displayed the highest inter-farm floristic turnover, demonstrating a heterogeneous landscape shaped by individual farming choices rather than uniform regional systems. A data-driven classification identified four distinct agroforestry profiles, ranging from dense, diverse stands to impoverished systems with few companion trees. Cocoa yields showed a statistically significant bell-shaped relationship with orchard age, peaking between 20 and 35 years. However, this relationship explained only a tiny fraction of variation and lacked predictive utility, highlighting the complexity of landscape management.
Côte d’Ivoire is the world’s leading cocoa producer, but its agroforestry systems have often lacked rigorous statistical characterisation. Demonstrating that companion tree diversity forms a complex regional mosaic helps researchers and agricultural planners understand ecological variability across landscapes. The finding that orchard age offers negligible predictive power for yields also cautions practitioners against relying on simple age metrics when planning farm productivity and interventions.
This work represents early-stage analytical research that provides a statistical framework and typology rather than a market-ready tool. It could eventually inform sustainable sourcing standards, carbon credit schemes, or agroforestry certification programmes used by cocoa buyers, agricultural cooperatives, and certification bodies. Any direct commercial implementation remains distant, as the findings must first be integrated into operational farm advisory services or landscape management systems.
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Abstract Cocoa ( Theobroma cacao L.) is grown in Côte d’Ivoire (the world’s leading producer), almost always in association with trees, yet these cocoa-based agroforestry systems (cocoa AFS) remain characterized largely descriptively, without a robust inferential framework or modern diversity indices. We analyse a survey database covering 474 farms and 103 localities across the three main cocoa-producing zones of Côte d’Ivoire, locally known as « loops » (East/South-East, Centre/Centre-West, South/South-West; surveys 2013-2016), applying a renewed ecological and statistical framework: Hill numbers ( q = 0, 1, 2), individual-based Hurlbert rarefaction, multiplicative alpha/beta/gamma diversity partitioning, ordination ( PCoA ) and PERMANOVA on Bray-Curtis matrices, Ward’s hierarchical clustering for a data-driven floristic typology, multivariate MANOVA , and linear mixed models. Across 99 adequately sampled localities (≥10 stems), mean taxonomic richness and the Shannon index differed significantly among zones ( MANOVA : Wilks’ λ = 0.350; F 8,180 = 15.5; p < 0.001), including after standardizing sampling effort by rarefaction ( F = 8.72; p < 0.001). Floristic composition differed significantly by zone ( PERMANOVA , pseudo-F = 2.85; p = 0.001), though with uneven within-group dispersion ( PERMDISP , p = 0.024) that calls for caution in interpretation. The Centre/Centre-West zone showed the highest beta diversity (inter-farm floristic turnover ≈ 16.4, versus 7.2 and 2.2 in the other two zones), revealing a highly heterogeneous mosaic of individual agroforestry choices rather than a homogeneous regional system. A typological classification based on floristic composition distinguishes four cocoa-AFS profiles, ranging from dense, diverse stands to impoverished systems with low densities of associated trees, partially but not fully overlapping with the zonal boundaries. At the scale of the three loops (n = 409 farms with both age and yield recorded), cocoa yield varied significantly by orchard age class ( Kruskal-Wallis , H = 18.2; p < 0.001), following a bell-shaped profile peaking around 20-35 years, consistent with the intermediate-age yield optimum suggested qualitatively by the source study; this relationship, robust to log-transformation of yield and to the exclusion of extreme values, nonetheless remains of small magnitude ( R² ≈ 1.5%) and confers no out-of-sample predictive power under cross-validation, illustrating the need to distinguish statistical significance from predictive utility. This reanalysis provides a reproducible and transferable statistical framework for characterizing West African cocoa AFS, and highlights the potential value of high beta diversity as a possible indicator of landscape resilience.
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DOI: 10.64898/2026.08.20.745955
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