Worth a Thousand Words

Coffee is rarely far from my mind—or my desk—especially in the middle of the week. As the most heavily traded commodity in the world after oil and produced primarily by small-scale farmers, coffee provides income for over 100 million people in the tropics. This week’s PLoS ONE featured image is taken from a paper by Juliana Jaramillo and colleagues in Germany, Colombia and the USA, in which the authors discuss the impact of global climate change on the coffee berry borer—a harmful pest to coffee crops—and on coffee production.

In the article, Thermal Tolerance of the Coffee Berry Borer Hypothenemus hampei: Predictions of Climate Change Impact on a Tropical Insect Pest, Jaramillo and her team combine biological data from lab studies with long-term climate predictions from Colombia and three east African countries (Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kenya), all of which are major producers of Arabica coffee. The researchers discuss the predicted effects on the coffee berry borer and the coffee plants and suggest strategies for improved coffee production in the context of global climate change.

The image is published as Figure 1 in the article; part a) shows a female coffee berry borer and part b) shows a female Hypothenemus hampei penetrating a coffee berry (photo a) by Eric Erbe (USDA, ARS) and photo b) by Gonzalo Hoyos (CENICAFE).

This image can be reused and redistributed, as with all of our content, simply by citing the journal and the authors under the terms of our Creative Commons Attribution License.

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