Exploring Brazil's Remnant Atlantic Forest | Hacker News Reader

Exploring Brazil's Remnant Atlantic Forest

photographylife.com

13 pointsvouaobrasil10 comments

This article makes it sound like the Atlantic Forest is ominously in danger of disappearing.

> Somewhere near the meeting of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais lie the partial remnants of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

That's one small patch of it. This forest's biome extends from the northeastern coast of Brazil all the way down to Rio Grande do Sul, and into Argentina and Paraguay. It's large, rich and in so many parts pretty inaccessible.

Sure it needs care. It's not running the risk of disappearing any time soon though.

It does seem like quite a lot of the original area has been lost

> Five hundred years ago, the Atlantic Forest of Brazil covered approximately 330 million acres (about twice the size of Texas), but today more than 85% of this forest has been cleared and what remains is highly fragmented.

https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/places...

Yes, that's right. I didn't mean to downplay how badly hurt the forest is. My point is that the author makes it seem like the one small patch he's been to is more or less all that's left, whereas it's really not.

One of the problems this biome faces is that the most populated areas of Brazil are along the same coastal region as the forest. That means cities take up its space. There's even pretty large patches of Atlantic Forest inside cities (like Floresta da Tijuca, in Rio de Janeiro), and there are whole regions of relatively untouched forest.

I've been to a few of those. I've bathed in waterfalls, climbed rocks and hiked trails.

It does need to be taken really good care, a lot more than it has. It's still there though, and is pretty large.

> It's not running the risk of disappearing any time soon though.

It is and I very much believe it will. Only 15% of it's original area remains.

Worst yet, the majority remaining patches are often so small that they can't sustain some of it's large predators (jaguars, anacondas, caimans, pumas, etc.)

I really hope it doesn't disappear because we've been hard at work with our partners there to protect it and restore animal habitats there. But we'll see. The expanding greed of big Ag is a mighty force...

We just bought 3 hectares that are protected, near a protected state park in bahia. The laws protecting the property we purchased are pretty weak. We and our neighbors are trying to reforest 80+% of our property but that's only a few dozen hectares. In Brazil the incentives lean towards trying to produce cash crops it seems - cacao, dendê, whatever. But that isn't going to reforest the vast areas that need it.

Not sure how well protected this property is in general but if it is then this small personally owned land patches might be one part in protecting these lands.

No company in there right mind would be chasing thousands of international land owners for a few hectares each

I didn't say the forest would disappear, but that the species in it are at risk of disappearing. That's already happened for some species, and it's often the case that reduced portions of the forest will not support more specialist species

Posting as a new comment as I can't edit the original.

Thanks to everyone who replied to me. I guess I wasn't aware of the extent of the issue. I'll inform myself better.

What I found interesting when I visited Brazil was that the Atlantic Forest felt much more like the jungles of animated movies (and even live movies) that I had seen in my childhood, than the actual jungle (Amazonas area, at least around ji-parana and Manaus). I liked it a lot.

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