Cerrado

The most biodiverse savanna ecosystem on Earth and the second largest vegetation region in Brazil after the Amazon, a vast tropical savanna of wooded grassland, gnarled fire-adapted trees and gallery forest strung along its rivers, covering roughly two million square kilometers, about twenty-one percent of Brazil's territory. It holds more than ten thousand plant species alongside over twelve hundred bird species and roughly four hundred mammal species, an estimated five percent of all species on Earth concentrated into one biome, and its deep-rooted vegetation and periodic natural fires, long a built-in part of the ecosystem's own regime rather than a disruption of it, recycle nutrients through soils that are naturally poor and acidic. Sitting between the Amazon, the Atlantic Forest and the Pantanal, the Cerrado has been cleared for agriculture, chiefly soybean cultivation and cattle pasture, faster than the neighboring Amazon rainforest in recent decades, while carrying far less land under formal protection.