Brazil’s Cerrado biome lost 13.9 million hectares of native vegetation within 500 meters of rivers and other waterways between 1985 and 2025. This area accounts for more than a quarter (26.9%) of all native vegetation converted to other uses during that period.
The data come from a study of the Cerrado released Thursday (Oct. 8) as part of MapBiomas Collection 11, which provides annual land-cover and land-use maps of Brazil.
According to Bárbara Costa, a member of the MapBiomas Cerrado team, the loss of this vegetation cover may affect water quality and availability and make the landscape more vulnerable to extreme weather events such as droughts and heavy rainfall.
“Vegetation near rivers helps protect the soil, reduce erosion, and prevent sediment from reaching watercourses,” Costa explains.
Of the six major river basins that originate in the Cerrado, the Upper Tocantins Basin lost the most native vegetation along its waterways over the past 41 years, totaling 2.9 million hectares. The loss was also significant in the Araguaia Basin, at 2.7 million hectares.
The Upper Tocantins and Araguaia rivers together accounted for 41 percent of the total loss of native vegetation within 500 meters of rivers in the Cerrado.
General data
Over the period analyzed, the Cerrado biome experienced a net loss of 51.7 million hectares of native vegetation, equivalent to a 34 percent reduction. However, considering the biome’s entire historical loss, 49.6 percent of its original native vegetation had been lost by 2025.
Among the vegetation types, savanna formations were the most affected, with a 41 percent loss, equivalent to 34 million hectares. Forest formations lost 25 percent of their area, or about 12.8 million hectares, while grassland formations declined by 39 percent, losing 3.6 million hectares.
Most of the native vegetation gave way to cropland and pasture, which expanded from 46.7 million to 97.9 million hectares, covering 48.9 percent of what was once the Cerrado. In 2025, cropland accounted for 29.7 million hectares of this total, while pasture covered 53.9 million hectares.
From 1985 to 2025, five states and the Federal District lost more than half of their native vegetation cover, joining São Paulo, which already had only 24.1 percent of its original native Cerrado vegetation at the start of the historical series. The states are Goiás, Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso do Sul, Pará, and Pernambuco.
Preservation
Among the states that have retained native vegetation across more than half of their territory, Piauí has the highest proportion, at 78.2 percent, followed by Rondônia at 76.5 percent and Maranhão at 67.4 percent.
Among municipalities, 301 no longer have a predominance of native vegetation; of these, 227 now have less than 20 percent of their Cerrado area covered by native vegetation.
By 2025, agriculture and livestock farming had become predominant across 61 percent of the Cerrado areas within municipalities, compared with 41 percent in 1985.
Most of the loss of native vegetation in the biome - 77.7 percent - occurred on private land. In protected areas or areas designated for collective use, such as indigenous lands, quilombola territories, and conservation units, the loss over the 41-year period amounted to 13.9 percent.