Nordeste

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Most conservation and science projects in the tropics focus on the rain forest biome, neglecting the fact that 50% of the lowland tropics is covered by dry biomes such as dry forests or savannas. These dry areas are home to 30% of the global population, and are hence massively impacted by human activity. This project focuses on the dry forests of the Caatinga region of North East Brazil, which have suffered from scientific neglect, destruction, and lack of conservation attention, with only <1% of these forests included in Brazil's National Protected Area Network. Despite this, the dry forests of the Caatinga house a high level of unique (endemic) plant species that are adapted to the region's severe and erratic droughts. These plants will be a valuable resource as climates change especially for the 15% of Brazil's population that lives in the Caatinga region who depend on these woodlands for ecosystem services and more specific needs such as firewood.
Our project will increase our understanding on how dry biomes contribute to global biogeochemical cycles and how their unique species react to environmental changes, expanding ecological and biodiversity monitoring in Brazil beyond Amazonia and into the Caatinga. The project will build a platform from which Brazil, and Latin America more generally, can monitor more effectively biodiversity and ecosystem services in dry biomes.
We aim to develop whole-system knowledge for the Caatinga to inform responsible management of this unique environment at national and regional political level in Brazil. Brazil has an obligation to monitor its biodiversity and carbon stocks under the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Aichi 2020 Biodiversity Targets, but most previous work has been focused on Amazonia. In particular, this project is relevant to achieving Strategic Goal 3 ('...safeguarding ecosystems, species and genetic diversity through direct interventions such as increasing the coverage, effectiveness and representativeness of protected areas and other area-based conservation measures...') and Strategic Goal 4 ('...safeguarding and enhancement of the benefits of biodiversity and ecosystem services to human societies') of the Aichi targets.
Our project will provide impetus and build capacity for conservation action in the Caatinga. We aim to build bridges between scientists and policy makers who can influence their protection and sustainable management at federal and state level via two policy meetings in Brasilia and Salvador. We will also build environmental science capacity in Brazil for undergraduate and postgraduate students in cutting edge methodologies in biodiversity and ecological science, and involve local communities in the collection of our biodiversity and ecological data. Our project will therefore build long-term capacity to monitor species composition, carbon stock, biogeochemical cycles, vegetation dynamics, and biodiversity loss in the Caatinga.
The project will also benefit local people in NE Brazil through delivery of user-friendly information about plant species useful for ecological restoration, crop wild relatives, minor crops, and useful plants. In the long-term, our science will provide information essentially to successful restoration of Caatinga, for example by a better understanding of the genetic diversity of its plants. Such restoration could have major regional and global ecological effects - for example it has been estimated that large scale dry forest restoration in Latin America could generate up to 8Pg of carbon storage. In the long-term, the knowledge of biome-level ecological processes gained during the project will enable the sustainable management of ecosystem services that underlie human wellbeing in Brazil and more widely.