Gran Chaco

The Gran Chaco is a vast, semiarid lowland region of central South America, spanning more than a million square kilometers across parts of Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil within the Rio de la Plata basin, and ranks as the continent's second largest forested ecoregion after the Amazon. Its landscape mixes tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forest, thorn scrub, savanna, wetland and palm groves, supporting roughly 3,400 plant species, about 500 bird species, 150 mammal species and more than 200 reptiles and amphibians, among them jaguars, giant armadillos, peccaries and maned wolves. The Chaco has been home for centuries to Indigenous peoples including the Wichi, Qom, Pilaga, Guarani and Ayoreo, and today supports roughly four million people, many still following traditional land based livelihoods. Its forests and soils store significant carbon and help regulate regional water cycles, but recent decades have brought extensive clearing for cattle ranching and soybean farming, with Argentina's share of the Chaco alone losing about seven million hectares of forest between 1998 and 2023, making it one of the most rapidly deforested regions on Earth.