A few kilometers from the city Águas de Santa Bárbara, the Santa Bárbara Ecological Station (SBES) is an “island” of biodiversity amid the agricultural sea of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. In just over 3,000 hectares, maintained under the care of four or five workers, more than 500 native species of plants, among different inventories, an enormous variety of vertebrates among amphibians, birds, reptiles, and mammals have already been found. A relatively high portion of these species is classified as regionally threatened, according to the São Paulo state red list of threatened species. Such tremendous biodiversity is probably related to the typical landscapes of the Cerrado biome that prevail in the area, ranging from scrublands to woodlands and gallery forests.
The name Cerrado is intended for the large region that covers the entire Brazilian open diagonal, except for the Caatinga and Pantanal biomes. It can be classified as a savannah, which originally designates landscapes dominated mainly by grasses and few trees. However, the Cerrado biome comprises several types of vegetation. Among them:
• Grasslands (campo limpo): a landscape completely covered by grasses, without trees, including some areas that are occasionally flooded.
• Grassy scrublands (campo sujo): also dominated by grasses but with a certain number of shrubs, palms and sparse trees.
• Grassy scrublands with scattered trees (campo cerrado): presents a greater number of sparse trees than the grassy scrubland (comprising about 15% of the vegetation cover).
• Typical cerrados: complex landscape in which trees (from 3 to 8 m height) fill the scenery even more but do not form a continuous canopy, the understory contains heterogeneously distributed shrubs and grasses covering the ground.
• Woodlands (cerradão): forests dominated by taller trees (from 8 to 12 m), almost continuous canopy and almost no grasses.
• Gallery forests: forest landscapes that necessarily present a source of running water, such as streams or creeks.