The Pampa grassland of South America covers just 2% of Brazil’s territory, dwarfed to the north by the immense rainforest, wetland and savanna landscapes of the Amazon, Pantanal and Cerrado. But while global attention focuses on these latter three, the “invisible” biome of the Pampa, at Brazil’s southernmost tip, is being degraded almost unnoticed. The Pampa covers the entirety of Uruguay and portions of several provinces in Argentina, and in Brazil covers half the state of Rio Grande do Sul, spanning some 9 million hectares (22 million acres) in 1985. By 2022, the Brazilian portion had shrunk by nearly a third, according to data from the collaborative mapping initiative MapBiomas, with much of the grassland vegetation cleared for agriculture and forestry. During that 38-year period, MapBiomas found, agricultural land use in the Brazilian Pampa increased by 2.1 million hectares (5.2 million acres), mainly for soybean cultivation, while forestry plantations (pine and eucalyptus) expanded by more than 720,000 hectares (1.8 million acres) — growth of 1,667%. The research also looked at the Uruguayan and Argentine portions of the Pampa (across the three countries, the biome covers a total area of 110 million hectares, or 272 million acres — nearly twice the size of France). It showed a total reduction of 20% of the grassland vegetation in the biome from 1985-2022, including 9.1 million hectares (22.5 million acres) of native grassland. Hectare for hectare, the Brazilian Pampa has the greatest biodiversity of plant species of any of the country’s biomes, according to…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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