Vincent de Leijster

111 Ecosystem services trajectories in coffee agroforestry in Colombia over 40 years 5 in biotic and abiotic conditions, such as local climatic conditions, slope, aspect, former land- use, and landscape configuration, which may influence ecological processes measured in space-for-time substitutions. Some of the indicators we used, such as butterfly communities, pest control, soil conditions and coffee production, are more sensitive to these confounding factors than others, such as above-ground carbon. A strength of the current study is that we were able to identify general development trajectories and the variation in interactions between ecosystem services over longer time periods (≥10 years). However, it is not possible to use the results of this study to predict detailed changes in ecosystem service supply over time with a yearly resolution. We used a rapid ecosystem services assessment technique (Meyer et al., 2015) in which we assessed a wide range of ecosystem services to test the development of general ecosystem services performance over time. This enables us to find general trajectories of ecosystem services but does not allow to fully understand the ecological processes that drive the trajectory in each single ecosystem service. We suggest that analyses based on the ecosystem service cascade approach could complement our results by adding insights into the underlying ecological dynamics that occur during the development of a single ecosystem service (Mace et al., 2012). 5.5.5 Conclusion This study provides empirical support for a higher level of ecosystem services in agroforestry than in monocultures and that agroforestry can be used to catalyze the development of ecosystem services. Therefore, we emphasize that agroforestry can indeed provide many restoration opportunities. This study showed that spatial arrangements of trees affects the rehabilitation potential and that trees dispersed over the farm provided more regulating and supporting ecosystem services compared to trees in living fences or in alley formation. Further, we found that agroforestry provides, aside from coffee, also timber as a provisioning service. The use of this timber resources is currently under-utilized; therefore, we suggest sustainable forestry practices with conservation of some mature trees on the farm play an important role in habitat provisioning for epiphytes. Finally, we found more evidence that agroforestry may improve coffee bean quality, which should be considered by specialty coffee traders.