Cerrado e Pantanal, reservas de vida

... At the continental scale, the influence of adjacent forest domains (Amazon and Atlantic Forest) on the composition of the Cerrado flora (Felfili et al. 1994) and fauna (Silva 1995) reflects this savanna-forest dynamic, indicating that the central position of the Cerrado in the continent played a role in defining its high species richness. Acting as an adaptive pressure for as long as four million years before present, the fire factor also contributed to the evolutionary processes that shaped this hotspot's biodiversity (Simon et al. 2009;Cavalcanti et al. 2010). At the local scale, isotope-derived evidence shows that forest incrustations advanced towards savanna edges since the last deglaciation (~7,000 years before present), with rates of expansion varying as a function of fire regime and soil composition Hoffmann et al. 2012). ...

... Climate-vegetation interactions that controlled past evolutionary processes in the Cerrado took place through millennia. Even considering this time span, environmental changes related to climate may have been too abrupt to some taxa, as in the case of the terrestrial megafauna that lived in the Cerrado and became extinct some 10,000 years before present (Aguiar et al. 2004;Cavalcanti et al. 2010). Human activities have influenced the climatic system on a much shorter time scale in recent decades. ...