Forest cover drives bird occupancy across guilds and habitats in a Colombian coffee‐farming landscape

Efforts to conserve biodiversity in coffee landscapes often emphasize shade management at the farm scale, yet the extent of surrounding forest may ultimately determine conservation outcomes. We used Bayesian community occupancy models and two seasons of bird point‐count data to assess how landscape composition and local vegetation structure interact to affect multiple bird guilds using coffee farms and forests in the Colombian Andes. Forest cover in a 2 km radius positively predicted bird species occupancy for all ecological guilds and conservation concern species in both coffee and forest habitats. Forest specialists required forest habitat with >32% surrounding forest cover to achieve median occupancy, whereas in the same landscape, median generalist occupancy was maintained in shade coffee habitat (i.e. coffee grown under a canopy of trees) with ≥10 tree species and ≥45% canopy cover. The complexity of local vegetation (i.e. shade tree cover and diversity) required to maintain generalist bird occupancy in coffee increased as forest cover decreased in the surrounding landscape. Responses to local vegetation structure varied among guilds. Dense and diverse shade coffee benefited generalists, frugivores, insectivores and nectarivores, while sun coffee (i.e. intensified monoculture) and early successional forest benefited granivores and omnivores. Seasonal occupancy shifted among habitats, with increased forest use during December–January across guilds, suggesting temporal variation in habitat requirements. Synthesis and applications. Increasing landscape forest cover would improve occupancy for nearly all bird guilds using coffee and forest habitats in the Eastern Colombian Andes. Conserving forest and enhancing shade coffee are complementary–not interchangeable–strategies: landscape forest cover shapes the conditions under which farm‐scale habitat management can sustain diverse bird communities.