Stephannie Fernandes

This review raises awareness of the Cerrado’s value to society and serves as an informative guide for ecology professionals, policymakers, and anyone interested in biodiversity conservation. Herein, we comprehensively and critically address the ongoing degradation process of the Cerrado, highlighting its ecological complexity, biological diversity, and strategic importance for environmental sustainability and climate change mitigation in Brazil. We examine the diversity of ecosystems in the Cerrado, highlighting their specific vulnerabilities and the inadequacy of current legal instruments to guarantee their protection. Our analysis covers the main vectors of pressure on the territory, such as the advance of the agricultural frontier, the predatory use of fire, the silent water crisis, and threats to Indigenous peoples, highlighting how these factors operate in an interconnected manner to disrupt the region’s ecosystem services. The limitations of current conservation policies and the invisibility of species and ecosystems in the face of the dominant legal and economic systems are also discussed. Our review proposes ways to mitigate or even reverse this scenario, including increasing the number of Conservation Units and Indigenous lands, valuing regenerative economies, expanding protected areas, and strengthening territorial and climate governance. The defense of the Cerrado is presented here not only as an ecological imperative but as an agenda for environmental justice, water security, and intergenerational responsibility. By integrating data, references, conceptual reflections, and action strategies, we hope to contribute to repositioning the Cerrado at the center of discussions on conservation, climate, and sustainable development.

Although holding high levels of biodiversity and providing uncountable ecosystem services, wetlands remain poorly understood and protected, particularly in South America, where these ecosystems are being destroyed quickly by infrastructure facilities, land-use change, water pollution, and fire, mostly related to climatic triggers. Nevertheless, few studies have assessed and synthesized fire patterns among South American wetlands. The lack of an overarching view on this issue has constrained our knowledge of how fire patterns affect these ecosystem, and thus hindered integrated fire management at a large scale. Overlapping wetland maps to terrestrial ecoregions and satellite-derived fire activity indicators, we ranked ecoregions mostly affected by wetland fires. Of 109 South America’s ecoregions, the Pantanal, Cerrado, Llanos, Beni savanna, and Humid and Dry Chaco accounted for the most of fire foci on wetlands and the largest burned wetland area. There is a pressing need to create a cross national system based on warnings, helping decision-makers, local communities, scientists, and fire brigades to properly manage fires in South America’s wetlands at a large scale.

In 1975, Robert Goodland and Howard Irwin suggested that “there is mounting pressure to exploit Amazonia; much of this pressure could and should be diverted to the continuous Cerrado region” (Goodland and Irwin 1975, p. 37; see also Goodland and Irwin 1977). The idea was the Cerrado (central Brazilian savanna) would be what is known in Brazil as a boi de piranha, or the myth that one can throw a cow into a stream to be devoured by piranhas in order to allow one's herd of cattle to safely ford the stream some distance away. The subsequent rampant devastation of the biodiverse Cerrado would lead Goodland to regret this suggestion. Brazil's 2023–2026 presidential administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has reduced deforestation rates in the Amazon after the disastrous environmental policies of Lula's predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, but clearing has increased in the neighboring Cerrado. The Brazilian Amazon, with an area two times larger than the Cerrado, lost 9,064 square kilometers (km²) of vegetation in 2023, representing a 23% drop compared with the previous year, whereas the Cerrado had an increase of 3%, with annual clearing reaching an incredible 11,011 km² in 2023 (INPE 2024). The projections for 2024 indicate even greater loss: 12,000 km². This frightening destruction in the Cerrado is due to historically lax environmental legislation, government policies stimulating agribusiness, and a lack of international support for environmental controls in the Cerrado. Only 8% of the original Cerrado area is protected in conservation units (figure 1) (Pereira and Fernandes 2022), and Brazil's Forest Code requires a smaller percentage of private land to be protected in Cerrado (35% in areas adjacent to the Amazon and 20% in the rest of the Cerrado) than in the Amazon Forest, where 80% must be protected (Metzger et al. 2019). Soybeans and other products from areas being cleared in the Cerrado should not be accepted by countries that import these commodities.

Our motivation for writing this editorial is to alert the academic community about the risks of predatory publishing in Biology. By piggy-backing on the open access (OA) movement and taking advantage of the “publish or perish” culture in a system that prioritises quantity over quality, predatory publishing has grown exponentially in recent years and spread across all areas of knowledge. Thousands of predatory journals and books have emerged and (provided a fee is paid) they publish scientific papers and chapters without submitting them to rigorous peer review. Now there are even predatory meetings, which promise to accept talks and publish complete works for a fee, also without reviewing them properly. These profit-making machines can damage both academia and society, putting at risk the quality of science and public trust in it, the well-being of the population, the conservation of biodiversity and the mitigation of climate change. We show the modus operandi behind invitations to contribute to predatory journals, books and meetings and suggest ways to separate the wheat from the chaff. Finally, we discuss the need to create regulatory agencies that perform a careful and systematic evaluation of the activities carried out by publishers.