Do tea plantations support wildlife and biodiversity?

Yes, when well managed. A 2023 peer-reviewed study (Wu et al., PeerJ) recorded 262 birds across 37 species and 23 families in 30 tea plantations in Anji County, China, including both forest-associated and urban-adapted species. Researchers described tea gardens as a transitional habitat zone between natural and urban environments.

What did the Anji County, China bird study find in tea plantations?

Researchers from Zhejiang Sci-Tech University surveyed 30 tea plantations in Anji County in August 2021, recording 262 individual birds across 37 species. Nature-dependent bird species were most strongly associated with tea gardens planted with perennial herbs and shrubs, while urban-adapted species preferred simpler ground cover — showing that plant structure, not just the presence of tea, determines habitat value.

Where is Boteane's Dragon Magic tea grown?

Dragon Magic is a single-origin green tea grown in Yunnan Province, China, a region with centuries of tea-growing tradition that integrates cultivation with surrounding plant diversity and wildlife habitat.

Does tea certification guarantee an entirely ethical supply chain?

No. Certification data on biodiversity outcomes, such as increased bird and mammal diversity on certified farms, is specific and well documented, but it is not a blanket guarantee that every certified estate is free of labour or environmental concerns. The tea industry, like most agriculture, continues to face genuine scrutiny on these issues.

Tea Garden Wildlife Habitat | Boteane Journal

Q: Does Rainforest Alliance certification make a measurable difference to biodiversity on tea farms?

Research on certified tea farms in Kenya found 30% more bird species and close to double the mammal diversity compared with nearby uncertified farms. Rainforest Alliance certification requires estates to maintain shade-tree diversity, protect riparian zones, and reduce agrochemical use, which are the specific practices linked to these outcomes.

Quick answer: Yes — a well-managed tea garden functions as a genuine wildlife habitat. Peer-reviewed research recorded 262 birds across 37 species in 30 Chinese tea plantations, and certified estates in Kenya host 30% more bird species than uncertified land nearby. Below is what the research actually found, and how it connects to Boteane's own Dragon Magic tea.

A bird lands in the leaves before the pickers do. At dusk, something smaller moves between the rows — a bat, working the last light for insects the day's heat brought out. Neither is passing through. Both are home. This is what a tea garden wildlife habitat actually looks like, once you know where to look.

We said as much in a shorter email a few days ago, and promised the fuller version. Here it is.

What the Anji County study actually found

In August 2021, five researchers from Zhejiang Sci-Tech University — Jueying Wu, Jinli Hu, Xinyu Zhao, Yangyang Sun and Guang Hu — spent a season counting birds across 30 tea plantations in Anji County, the part of Zhejiang Province known, with some pride, as the White Tea Capital. Their findings were published in February 2023 in the peer-reviewed journal PeerJ, under the title "Role of tea plantations in the maintenance of bird diversity in Anji County, China." They recorded 262 birds across 37 species and 23 families. Not a passing sample: a tree sparrow here, a light-vented bulbul there, barn swallows working the open rows in numbers — the three most commonly recorded species in the whole study.

The finding that matters most isn't the headline count. It's what the birds were doing there. The researchers split every species into two groups: birds that prefer built-up, human environments, and birds that prefer natural ones — forest, mountain, water. Both groups turned up in the tea gardens, in real numbers. That's the detail worth sitting with. A well-run tea garden isn't a compromise habitat that only the least fussy species will tolerate. It's genuinely doing two jobs at once — refuge for birds displaced by the forest edge shrinking, and overflow habitat for birds pushed out by the city expanding toward it. The researchers called it a transitional zone. We'd call it a garden doing more work than it gets credit for.

Why some gardens qualify and others don't

Not every tea garden earns this. The study found the birds that prefer natural habitats were drawn specifically to gardens planted with perennial herbs and shrubs — plants that come back year after year, with the height and density to actually shelter something. Birds happier around people showed up wherever the ground cover was simpler. Either way, the pattern held: structure attracts life. A tea garden stripped back to bare rows, sprayed hard, and replanted from scratch each season doesn't offer either group anything to work with. The birds aren't choosing tea. They're choosing what's been left standing around it — the trees kept for shade, the herbs left to establish, the ground not scoured bare.

That distinction is the whole argument for why we care about certification at all, and it's the part worth being precise about.

What certification is actually measuring

Rainforest Alliance certification requires estates to hold onto shade-tree diversity, protect the ground around streams and rivers, and cut back on agrochemicals — not aspirations, conditions written into the standard. Wildlife writer Muhammad Sadiq reported the figures in an April 2026 piece for Animals Around The Globe, titled "How Tea Plantations Support Biodiversity and Wildlife": research conducted on certified tea farms in Kenya compared those estates against nearby uncertified land and found 30% more bird species and close to double the mammal diversity on the certified ground. That's not a marketing number. It's the measurable difference between a garden managed to a standard and one that isn't.

We want to be precise about what that does and doesn't tell you. It tells you something real and specific about biodiversity outcomes on certified land. It is not a claim that every certified estate everywhere is beyond scrutiny — tea's supply chain, like most of agriculture, still has real and ongoing labour and environmental questions worth taking seriously, and we'd rather say that plainly than let a good statistic imply more than it proves. What we can stand behind is narrower and, we think, more useful: certification changes what grows and what survives on the land your tea comes from. That's worth choosing on its own terms.

Where Dragon Magic sits in this

Dragon Magic is grown in Yunnan Province — single-origin, nothing blended in. Yunnan is also where some of the oldest continuous tea-growing knowledge in the world still shapes how the land is worked: centuries of local practice integrating tea cultivation with the plant diversity and habitat around it, long before anyone called it agroecology. It's not the same garden the Anji researchers walked through — that study was Zhejiang Province, a different region entirely, and we won't pretend otherwise. But it's the same underlying idea, proven twice over in two different parts of China: leave enough of the wild in place, and the wild stays.

We'll keep the full studies on file for anyone who wants to read past our summary of them — reply to the email and we'll send them straight over.