Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2009
Brazil is the largest country in South America in both population and area, and ranks fifth largest in the world at 8,511,965 km2. Lying mainly in the tropics, its immense variety of habitat types ranges from the vast, luxuriant Amazon rain forests in the north to the Atlantic coastal forests in the east, the savannas of the central plateau and the Brazilian pine forests and flat, almost treeless pampas of the south; its great diversity of animal species includes some found nowhere else in the world.