Biodiversity Conservation in Atlantic Forest Ecosystems

The Atlantic Forest of eastern South America is one of the world’s most biodiverse and highly threatened tropical biomes. Once covering over a million square kilometres, it has been reduced to less than 12 percent of its original area by agriculture, urban expansion and logging. The remaining fragments support exceptionally high levels of endemism across plants, insects, birds and mammals. Conservation efforts focus on protecting core remnants, restoring connectivity through biological corridors and integrating local communities in sustainable land-use systems. Climate change adds a further layer of pressure, shifting species’ suitable habitats and exacerbating edge effects in small fragments. A multi-tiered strategy combining systematic protected-area planning, agroforestry promotion and habitat-specific management is emerging as the most promising route to safeguard the intricate web of biotic interactions that sustains this hotspot.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies project substantial declines in the bioclimatic area of habitat for native agroforestry species under mid-century climate scenarios. Using machine-learning distribution models, researchers have quantified a mean loss of 22–56 percent of suitable habitat, depending on species’ dispersal capacity. When quantified against extinction-risk criteria, over two thirds of these species may qualify as threatened due to climate-driven habitat loss. The work highlights the dual role of rural and peri-urban agroecosystems: they can both exacerbate habitat fragmentation and serve as complementary refuges when managed to include native trees and understory species, thereby contributing to long-term in situ conservation.

Biodiversity Conservation in Atlantic Forest Ecosystems publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in biodiversity conservation in atlantic forest ecosystems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Environmental niche modelling: A computational method to predict a species’ geographic distribution based on environmental variables.

Bioclimatic Area of Habitat (BAH): The spatial extent in which climatic conditions permit a species to maintain viable populations.

Metapopulation: A network of separate populations of the same species that interact through dispersal among habitat patches.

Species turnover: The change in community composition between different sites or over time, reflecting gains and losses of species.

References

1. Brazilian Atlantic Forest lato sensu: the most ancient Brazilian forest, and a biodiversity hotspot, is highly threatened by climate change. Brazilian Journal of Biology (2010).
2. Climate change threatens native potential agroforestry plant species in Brazil. Scientific Reports (2022).
3. Planning protected areas network that are relevant today and under future climate change is possible: the case of Atlantic Forest endemic birds. PeerJ (2018).
4. Habitat‐specific impacts of climate change in the Mata Atlântica biodiversity hotspot. Diversity and Distributions (2019).
5. Emerging hotspots of tree richness in Brazil. Acta Botanica Brasilica (2020).