Introduction

Abstract

Brazil is a country with continental dimensions having a wide variety of landscapes. These landscapes were divided into nine (from south to north): (1) the Pampas that constitute a low-range plateau relief with sub-tropical climate and the grasslands vegetation; (2) the Subtropical Araucaria Plateaus, characterized by volcanic and sedimentary plateaus with sub-tropical climate, grasslands, and ombrophilous forests; (3) the Tropical Atlantic which encompasses ranges and coastal plains that receive the direct humidity of the Atlantic Ocean and therefore has a humid tropical climate and tropical humid forest vegetation; (4) the Pantanal, which is a relief depression with Semi-humid climate which in the rainfall season becomes a great wetlands; (5) the Semi-humid landscape characterized by many plateaus and depressions with Semi-humid climate and savannah vegetation; (6) the Semi-arid landscape that constitutes ranges, plateaus and depressions with dry climate and steppe vegetation; (7) the Cocais, that is, a transitional landscape between the Semi-humid, Semi-arid, and the Amazon domains, that developed on lowlands; (8) The Amazon, an immense super-humid green area occupying the entire northern/northwestern of Brazil, with a complex relief and the largest rivers and rain forests of the world; (9) the Coastal Brazil which is not a typical landscape unit since it has characteristics changing accordingly to the neighboring units, but it is a synthesis of the Brazilian coast which has more than 9.200 km of extension and high variable environments. Because of its history involving a series of peoples—indigenous, Latin American, Germanic and Slavic, African, Japanese, Arab—Brazil is today a complex society with two hundred million inhabitants, reasonably industrialized and a great producer of food and minerals. Nowadays, it is one of the ten biggest economies in the world and has many cities with more than one million people.