Brazil's richest savanna covers a fifth of the nation
After the Amazon, the Cerrado is Brazil's second-greatest habitat, holding about 21 percent of the country—some two million square kilometres of mosaic savanna. WWF calls it the planet's biologically richest tropical savanna, yet roughly three-quarters sits in private hands.
This tropical savanna ecoregion sprawls through Brazil's interior highlands and several neighbouring states, reaching into Paraguay and Bolivia at the margins. Habitat types shift among forest, wooded, park, and grassy savanna plus wetlands and gallery forests. Climate is semi-humid tropical with wet and dry seasons; most of the region sees average temperatures of 22–27 °C and 80–200 centimetres of rain, and a fierce southern-winter dry spell roughly April to September.
WWF highlights roughly 10,000 plant species and ten endemic birds; nearly 200 mammal species occur, only fourteen endemic. Tree diversity may approach 800 species, with legumes especially rich and Qualea (Vochysiaceae) often dominating. Goodland's canopy gradient runs from campo sujo's scattered three-metre trees to cerradão's near-fifty-percent cover around nine metres. Between open cerrado and streamside gallery forest lies wet campo where seasonal water-table swings suppress trees. Oxisol soils stay well drained, acidic, and calcium-poor; fire regimes favour thick corky bark. The first detailed European description came from the Danish botanist Eugenius Warming in his 1892 book Lagoa Santa, based on Minas Gerais.
Vertebrate tallies include about 150 amphibians, 120 reptiles, 837 birds, and 161 mammals. Prototype cerrado vegetation may reach back toward the Cretaceous before Africa and South America parted; glacial expansions and Amazon contractions likely fragmented refugia and boosted richness. Peatland soils can lock dense carbon, vulnerable if wetlands dry. Private ownership complicates reserves, so agricultural conversion and fire mismanagement threaten a biome that stores both biodiversity and climate-relevant carbon while still being cast as empty frontier.
Source: Cerrado
