Cerrado—South America

Abstract The Cerrado Biome is considered one of the most important savanna biomes in the world, due to its high species richness, endemism, and source of multiple valuable ecosystem services. The Cerrado landscape is diverse, with a mixture of open grasslands, shrub lands, open woodland, and closed canopy woodlands as the dominant ecosystems. The region also harbors ecologically important habitats more restricted in area, such as gallery forests, tropical dry forests, marshes, palm groves, and high elevation rocky grasslands, all of these important contributors to the overall diversity of the region. Many of Brazil's most important rivers originate in the Cerrado highlands and plateaus. The Cerrado also is home to a diverse and evolutionary distinctive flora and fauna, with multiple major sub-regions each with distinctive plant and animal species. Some of the diversity is evolutionarily quite old. The Cerrado has recently become a focal region for the expansion of Brazilian agriculture, and vast areas have been modified in the past 50 years. In addition, the population in the region has grown dramatically of the past five decades, placing additional demands on water resources. Although there are a number of important protected areas, the region is still under protected and more conservation effort needs to be applied to the protection of the biodiversity of the Cerrado in order to save this unique global resource.