Brazil safeguards a vast network of parks and reserves, termed conservation units. The creation of conservation units follows a rigorous legal protocol that grants them long-term stability under varying degrees of formal protection against land-use change. Degazettement, downsizing or downgrading any conservation unit requires a law to be passed. Recent shifts in Brazilian conservation policy have, however, favoured infrastructure projects and agricultural land conversion, even when these initiatives are in direct conflict with established conservation units. Several bills have been proposed by the National Congress, threatening 27 conservation units and bringing the long-term political stability and legal immunity of hitherto sacrosanct reserves into serious question

Protected areas form a quintessential component of the global strategy to perpetuate tropical biodiversity within relatively undisturbed wildlands, but they are becoming increasingly isolated by rapid agricultural encroachment. Here we consider a network of 788 forest protected areas (PAs) in the world’s largest tropical country to examine the degree to which they remain intact, and their responses to multiple biophysical and socioeconomic variables potentially affecting natural habitat loss under varying contexts of rural development. PAs within the complex Brazilian National System of Conservation Units (SNUC) are broken down into two main classes—strictly protected and sustainable use. Collectively, these account for 22.6% of the forest biomes within Brazil’s national territory, primarily within the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest, but are widely variable in size, ecoregional representation, management strategy, and the degree to which they are threatened by human activities both within and outside reserve boundaries. In particular, we examine the variation in habitat conversion rates in both strictly protected and sustainable use reserves as a function of the internal and external human population density, and levels of land-use revenue in adjacent human-dominated landscapes. Our results show that PAs surrounded by heavily settled agro-pastoral landscapes face much greater challenges in retaining their natural vegetation, and that strictly protected areas are considerably less degraded than sustainable use reserves, which can rival levels of habitat degradation within adjacent 10-km buffer areas outside.

Public land grabbing, concomitant with hinterland colonization and agrarian reform programs, translocated millions of rural migrants into remote regions of Brazil, most recently to the Amazonian forest domain. Despite state-of-the-art command-and-control and remote sensing monitoring systems in Brazil, effective law enforcement in a country of ∼8.5 million km2 remains a huge challenge, and particularly difficult in times of lenient central-government environmental policies. Cropland and pasture expansion is the most important factor in land use change in Brazil, and the leading driver of primary habitat conversion worldwide. This essay discusses the most likely business-as-usual agricultural frontiers in Northern and Central Brazil to make room for new farmland: the MaToPiBa region in the transitional Cerrado-Caatinga biogeographic zone; the northernmost Cerrado areas of Amapá; and the opening-up of Indigenous Lands to industrial scale agriculture. We discuss the origins, recent developments and implications to conservation of these new agricultural frontiers.

Five black-tailed marmoset Callithrix (Mico) melanura (Primates -Callitrichidae) individuals were monitored by radiotelemetry as part of a project on translocated wildlife affected by flooding the Manso River reservoir in the state of Mato Grosso, western Brazil (14° 52' S and 55° 48' W). The animals were monitored for eight months from October 2000 through August 2001. Only one death was recorded among the translocated animals. Two pairs established their home ranges in the new area, after some exploratory behavior. The new home range sizes varied from 0.72 to 4.27 km 2 . The home ranges of male and female overlapped in the case of both pairs by 0.59 to 2.30 km 2 . Trips were always made in pairs and not individually. The results indicate the feasibility of a successful translocation program for this species, as long as the animals are translocated to a similar habitat nearby.Keywords: hydroelectric plant, translocation, Callithrix (Mico) melanura, Cerrado, wildlife rescue, radiotelemetry. Palavras-chave: hidrelétrica, translocação, Callithrix (Mico) melanura, Cerrado, resgate de fauna, radiotelemetria.

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