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Photos of legless lizard and other newly discovered species in Brazil's Cerrado mongabay.com April 29, 2008
The research team, which included scientists from Conservation International (CI) and Brazilian universities, found 14 species believed new to science — including eight fish, three reptiles, one amphibian, one mammal, and one bird — in and around the Serra Geral do Tocantins Ecological Station, a 716,000-hectare (1,769,274-acre) protected area. "It's very exciting to find new species and data on the richness, abundance, and distribution of wildlife in one of the most extensive, complex, and unknown regions of the Cerrado," said CI biologist Cristiano Nogueira, the expedition leader. "Protected areas such as the Ecological Station are home to some of the last remaining healthy ecosystems in a region increasingly threatened by urban growth and mechanized agriculture."
"The geographic distribution of some of the species registered is restricted to the area of the ecological station; thus their survival depends on the good management of the protected area and its immediate surroundings," said LuÃs Fabio Silveira, of the Department of Zoology of the University of Sao Paulo. "From the survey we can obtain data concerning the anatomy, reproductive biology, life cycle, and distribution of the species, all of which help us in future conservation programs." Conservation International says the study will be used to support the development of a management plan for the Serra Geral do Tocantins Ecological Station. "We need to know our protected areas better, especially the ecological stations whose principal objective is to generate scientific knowledge of Brazilian biodiversity, so little studied and already so severely threatened," Nogueira said. "Unfortunately, extensive areas of the Cerrado, like the Ecological Station, are becoming increasingly rare, thus making the data collected even more important. Above all, it is necessary to know to conserve." The Cerrado, a wooded grassland in Brazil that once covered an area half the size of Europe, is fast being transformed into croplands to meet rising demand for soybeans, sugarcane, and cattle. The Cerrado is now disappearing more than twice as the rate as the neighboring Amazon rainforest, according to Ricardo Machado, author of a recent Conservation International (CI) study on the Cerrado. "The Cerrado was pretty much intact until the 60s, when most of the relevant economic activity was the cattle ranching," Dr. Ricardo Machado, author of a recent Conservation International (CI) study on the Cerrado, told mongabay.com. "During the 70s, when new technologies and new varieties of plants (corn, soybean, rice, wheat, eucalyptus, and grasses for livestock) where introduced the Cerrado became an important region for the Brazilian agribusiness. More and more native areas were cleared to be converted for planted pastures (using African grasses) or croplands. The natural vegetation removed was converted to charcoal to be used by the steel industry."
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