Lara Ribeiro Maia

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.

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.