Caatinga Ecosystem: A Geo-environmental and Human Perspective

The Caatinga is an ecosystem unique to Brazil, predominantly semiarid climate (300–900 mm/year), with high evapotranspiration (1500–2000 mm/year), and a dry season of 6–11 months (Moro et al. 2016a) (Figs. 1, 2, 3, and 4). Its location comprises much of the Northeast Region, extending to a small section of the Southeast Region of Brazil (Prado 2005; Banda-R et al. 2016; Moro et al. 2016a). It occupies 862,597.39 km2, equivalent to roughly 10% of the national territory (IBGE 2019), making it the world’s most extensive seasonally dry tropical forest (Lessa et al. 2019).