Qualla: Atlantic Forest Biosphere Reserve

Atlantic Forest Biosphere Reserve: Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ninety-three percent of it is gone. The Atlantic Forest once blanketed Brazil's eastern coast from the equatorial north to the subtropical south, a continuous canopy stretching more than 3,000 kilometers. Five centuries of agriculture, logging, urbanization, and industrial expansion have reduced it to fragments. What remains holds 171 of Brazil's 202 threatened species, including golden lion tamarins and woolly spider monkeys, animals that exist nowhere else on Earth. In 1991, Brazil drew a line on the map and called these fragments a biosphere reserve. It became the largest forested biosphere reserve in the world -- not because the forest is vast, but because the effort to save it had to be.

Atlantic Forest Biosphere Reserve: A Catastrophe on the Serra do Mar

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The event that forced action came in 1985. On the slopes of the Serra do Mar, the mountain range that runs along Brazil's southeastern coast, catastrophic landslides tore through deforested hillsides above Cubatao, one of the most polluted industrial cities in the world at the ti...

Atlantic Forest Biosphere Reserve: Fragments Across Fifteen States

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The reserve today is enormous in scope but scattered in reality. As of 2011, UNESCO reported a total area of roughly 29.5 million hectares, with core protected zones of about 4 million hectares, buffer zones of 12.6 million hectares, and transition areas of 12.8 million hectares....

Atlantic Forest Biosphere Reserve: What the Fragments Still Hold

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The biological richness of these remnants is staggering, given how little forest remains. Golden lion tamarins, their fur the color of a sunset, survive in a few pockets of lowland forest in Rio de Janeiro state. Woolly spider monkeys, the largest primates in the Americas, cling ...

Atlantic Forest Biosphere Reserve: Stitching the Pieces Together

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The reserve's strategy is connectivity. Since 2005, a project coordinated by the National Council of the Atlantic Forest Biosphere Reserve has worked to create protected-area mosaics along the Serra do Mar Ecological Corridor, linking isolated parks into larger functional landsca...