Qualla: Atlantic dry forests

Atlantic dry forests: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit roney, CC BY 2.0. The tree that gave this forest its signature species is called the barriguda - the pot-bellied one. Its scientific name is Cavanillesia arborea, but nobody who has seen one uses the Latin. The trunk swells out in the middle like an inverted gourd, sometimes more than 1.5 meters across at the widest point, storing water for the dry months when rain simply stops. The rest of the canopy reaches thirty meters into the air. The barriguda stands there looking both graceful and absurd, a tree with a belly, holding life together in one of Brazil's least-protected ecoregions. Welcome to the Atlantic dry forests - 115,100 square kilometers of deciduous and semi-deciduous woodland squeezed between the Cerrado savannas to the west and the Caatinga shrublands to the east.

Read more: Atlantic dry forests on Qualla

Image: roney | CC BY 2.0

Atlantic dry forests: A Forest Between Worlds

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit roney, CC BY 2.0. The Atlantic dry forests stretch from northern Minas Gerais state across western Bahia into central Piauí, tracing the upper São Francisco River and spilling into the basin of the Gurguéia River farther north. A large enclave lies on the Chapada Diamantina in east-central Bahia, ...

Read more: Atlantic dry forests on Qualla

Image: roney | CC BY 2.0

Atlantic dry forests: Barbara Brown's Titi

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit roney, CC BY 2.0. High in the canopy, a small primate fights to survive. Callicebus barbarabrownae - Barbara Brown's titi - is a critically endangered monkey found nowhere else on Earth. Only about 260 individuals remain in the wild, scattered across a handful of forest fragments that grow more is...

Read more: Atlantic dry forests on Qualla

Image: roney | CC BY 2.0

Atlantic dry forests: The Birds of the Dry Season

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit roney, CC BY 2.0. The forest breathes with seasonal rhythms that shape its animal life. At least twenty species of birds migrate north during the dry months, returning to breed when the rains come. Among the notable species that use this landscape are some of Brazil's most spectacular and most thr...

Read more: Atlantic dry forests on Qualla

Image: roney | CC BY 2.0

Atlantic dry forests: Seventy Percent Gone

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit roney, CC BY 2.0. Approximately 70 percent of the original forest has been cleared. The reasons are straightforward - agricultural expansion for crops and cattle, and charcoal production to feed Brazil's steel and pig iron industries. The most biologically rich forests, the ones on flat rich soils...

Read more: Atlantic dry forests on Qualla

Image: roney | CC BY 2.0

Atlantic dry forests: Limestone and Silence

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit roney, CC BY 2.0. Walking into a patch of intact Atlantic dry forest is walking into a place that feels both alive and precarious. The canopy thins overhead. The barriguda trees stand like quiet monuments. Tabebuia trees - the ones Brazilians call ipê - flower in yellow and pink bursts when the ra...

Read more: Atlantic dry forests on Qualla

Image: roney | CC BY 2.0