Qualla: IBGE Ecological Reserve

IBGE Ecological Reserve: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diacis de Alvarenga, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Cerrado is the richest savanna on Earth - and also one of the most rapidly vanishing. At the turn of the 2010s, it was being cleared at roughly 14,200 square kilometers a year, a pace that turns biomes into memory inside a generation. The IBGE Ecological Reserve sits on a gentle plateau 25 kilometers south of Brasília, a 1,300-hectare island of scientific refuge where researchers have been racing to document what exists before it disappears. More than a thousand scientific papers have drawn data from this one plot of land. 177 doctoral theses have been built on its observations. The cerrado doesn't perform for visitors here - visitors are mostly excluded - but for the biologists who do get access, this is one of the best-studied patches of savanna anywhere in the world.

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Image: Diacis de Alvarenga | CC BY-SA 4.0

IBGE Ecological Reserve: An Accidental Laboratory

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diacis de Alvarenga, CC BY-SA 4.0. Until 1956, cattle herders and subsistence farmers worked this land. Then the Federal District, just beginning to build its new capital on the plateau to the north, requisitioned it. In 1961 the land was donated to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics - the IBGE, w...

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Image: Diacis de Alvarenga | CC BY-SA 4.0

IBGE Ecological Reserve: A Cerrado Near Brasília

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit João Medeiros, CC BY 2.0. The reserve sits on Precambrian metasedimentary rocks from the Brasiliano orogeny - stone laid down between 550 and 900 million years ago, before animals with shells had evolved - capped by a Tertiary-era crust of detrital laterite. The land tilts gently between 1,048 and 1,160 m...

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Image: João Medeiros | CC BY 2.0

IBGE Ecological Reserve: The Rainy Season

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. From September or October through April or May, the rains come. Mean annual rainfall is 1,453 millimeters - enough for the cerrado's grasses to green up explosively and the streams to run full. The dry season that follows stretches May to September, and the average annual tempera...

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Image: Public domain

IBGE Ecological Reserve: A Plant List Longer Than Most Countries'

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. By 2004, researchers had catalogued 1,829 species of vascular plant inside the reserve - 1,503 native, 326 exotic. The phanerogamic flora here has been called the most diverse arboreal collection in Central Brazil. Eighteen species of liverworts have been pressed and identified. ...

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

IBGE Ecological Reserve: Wolves, Anteaters, and the Tapaculo

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hector Bottai, CC BY-SA 4.0. More than 250 species of birds pass through the reserve over the course of a year. Two waves of migrants time their arrival to insect abundance - a winter cohort and a spring cohort, both feasting. The giant anteater shuffles across its grasslands, nose to the ground, hunting ant...

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Image: Hector Bottai | CC BY-SA 4.0