I am analyzing one paper Deheuvelsa et al. 2010 Vegetation structure and productivity in cocoa-based agroforestry systems in

Talamanca, Costa Rica. I have a lot of questions since I am going to characterize the Cacao Agroforest System in Sodconusco Chiapas in other to make a study of Bird diversity and environmental services.

Deheuvelsa and colaborador use a methodology to search the relation between different Cacao Agroforest Clusters (Diversity and Vegetation Structure) and the productivity of Cacao.

They measure cacao productivity as a function of three components.

1) Counting The number of healthy pods in an area of 50mx20m in the center of the cacao Agroforest.

2) They collect 30 cacao pods in 2 seasons before the harvesting, in order to get the dray cacao comercial yield, they weight the fresh beans and applied the 56% discount to the average weight fresh.

3)Finally they estimated the Fresh above the ground plant volume, based on the function basal area x total height.

I am sure those measures are so important and determinant to get very precise data, but I wonder and some colleges suggest that, I could measure just the total dry weight asking the cacao smallholder, and I will get a direct measure of the total productivity of the plantation. But I am sure that I will miss valuable information with such simple method.

Deheuvelsa et al never explains what is the relevance to get those detailed measurements