Qualla: Central Atlantic Forest Ecological Corridor

Central Atlantic Forest Ecological Corridor: Introduction

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Only about seven percent of Brazil's original Atlantic Forest is still standing. What was once a 1.3-million-square-kilometer ribbon of rainforest along the coast - from Rio Grande do Norte down to Rio Grande do Sul - has been broken into islands by 500 years of logging, sugarcane, coffee, pasture, and cities. The Central Atlantic Forest Ecological Corridor is an ambitious attempt to reverse that fragmentation in the best-preserved middle section of the biome, knitting together more than 21 million hectares of protected fragments across Bahia and Espírito Santo so that the animals and plants trapped inside them can move again. In one hectare of forest in southern Bahia, researchers have counted 458 separate tree species. The corridor exists to make sure those hectares still talk to each other.

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Central Atlantic Forest Ecological Corridor: A Project Born in Brasília

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The corridor was conceived inside Brazil's Ministry of the Environment under the Ecological Corridors Project, finalized in December 2000. A grant agreement with the World Bank followed in December 2001, and the project went operational in March 2002. Planners faced a choice: whe...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Central Atlantic Forest Ecological Corridor: Private Land, Public Purpose

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The corridor's most striking feature is how little of it the state actually owns. By 2015 it encompassed roughly 21.5 million hectares across 163 municipalities, stretching about 1,200 kilometers north to south and including patches of ocean out to the continental shelf. Inside t...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Central Atlantic Forest Ecological Corridor: What Still Lives in the Green

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The species list the corridor protects reads like a summary of why the Atlantic Forest matters. The golden lion tamarin - a small primate with a mane of deep orange fur - is found nowhere else on Earth; it was brought back from near-extinction by captive breeding in the 1980s, an...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Central Atlantic Forest Ecological Corridor: The Long Work of Reconnection

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The work of the corridor is less about creating new protected areas than about making the existing ones connected. Strips of forest along streams, reforested pasture, agroforestry plots around villages, and recovering secondary forest all add up into pathways that let a tamarin t...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0