STORY: This is the world's largest urban coffee plantation, located in Brazil's sprawling city of Sao Paulo.
In early March, it welcomed around 1,500 new coffee plants...
As researchers prepare to study their capacity to resist pests and climate change.
:: This Earth
Brazil is the world's top producer of arabica coffee.
It's also the second-biggest producer of canephora coffees, which include varieties like robusta and conilon.
The plantation, Sao Paulo's Biological Institute, was established in 1927.
Its mission was to tackle a crisis caused by pests - like the coffee berry-borer beetle, which devour the beans hidden inside coffee cherries.
Researcher and agricultural engineer Harumi Hojo said that over the years, the institute began to investigate other factors affecting coffee plants, like soil and climate.
This plantation's in a neighborhood which already boasted over 2,000 coffee plants.
It has now welcomed arabica varieties billed as resistant to pests and coffee rust, a type of fungus.
As well as other plants more tolerant of drought-like conditions.
Hojo said it would be valuable in the future to have coffee plants that can hold out for irrigation with captured rain, rather than possibly scarce groundwater sources.
"We know that climate change and water issues are a problem for our future. If, after all this we can still manage, not by doing irrigation, but by irrigating something with rainwater harvesting, so that we can collect all the rainwater and, when there's a problem, irrigate not with water that's already depleted, but with what we've collected, I think that's great."
