ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Functional Plant Ecology
Tree diversity and soil fertility interactions drive carbon storage in degraded cocoa landscapes of Côte d'Ivoire
Provisionally accepted
Alain Atangana1*
Guillaume Kouassi1
Kouassi Bruno Kpangui2
Ebagnerin Jérome Tondoh3Valentin L F Wolf1Christophe Kouame1Damase Khasa4- 1World Agroforestry Centre (Kenya), Nairobi, Kenya
- 2Universite Jean Lorougnon Guede, Daloa, Côte d'Ivoire
- 3Universite Nangui Abrogoua, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
- 4Universite Laval, Québec City, Canada
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Understanding the ecological functioning of degraded cocoa landscapes is critical for restoring productivity and ecosystem services in West Africa. This study investigated how climate, geography, and land-use systems interact to shape tree diversity, soil fertility, and aboveground carbon (AGC) stocks across six cocoa-producing sites in Côte d'Ivoire. Field inventories and soil sampling to 50 cm depth were conducted across gradients of climate (1,150–1,650 mm rainfall) and land-use systems (fallow, cocoa agroforestry, and monocropping). Mixed-effects ANOVA, regression, and redundancy analyses were applied to test three hypotheses linking environmental gradients, tree diversity, and soil–carbon relationships. Land-use system had the strongest effect on tree diversity (P < 0.0001), with fallows supporting significantly higher richness (7.2 ± 0.51) and Shannon diversity (1.7 ± 0.05) than agroforestry or monocrop systems. Climate and site nested within climate also significantly influenced species abundance and evenness. Soil fertility indicators were primarily controlled by climate and geographic site, with significant effects on pH, exchangeable bases, and structural stability. Interactions between climate and land-use significantly affected soil pH, organic carbon, calcium, and cation exchange capacity. Stepwise regression identified aluminum, potassium, boron, and magnesium as key soil predictors of AGC (R² = 0.14; P < 0.0001), while species richness was the only diversity metric significantly associated with AGC (R² = 0.12; P < 0.0001). These results highlight the dominant role of species richness over functional diversityevenness and abundance in sustaining soil fertility and carbon storage, emphasizing biodiversity conservation as a cornerstone of cocoa landscape restoration.
Keywords: Aboveground carbon, Cocoa agroforestry, biodiversity–ecosystem function, Climate gradients, land-use systems, soil fertility, Tropical landscape restoration
Received: 24 Oct 2025; Accepted: 27 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Atangana, Kouassi, Kpangui, Tondoh, Wolf, Kouame and Khasa. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Alain Atangana
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.