Qualla: Águas Emendadas Ecological Station

Águas Emendadas Ecological Station: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adeilton O. de Souza, CC BY-SA 4.0. You can cross a continental divide here without climbing anything at all. Águas Emendadas sits on a stretch of the Central Brazilian plateau so nearly level that the watershed has no ridge to mark it — just a long, damp corridor of grass and buriti palms about six kilometres end to end, seeping water from a dozen quiet points along its length. At one end that water gathers into the Vereda Grande and heads north. At the other it gathers into the Brejinho and heads south. The name means joined waters, and it is the most literal place name in the Federal District.

Image: Adeilton O. de Souza | CC BY-SA 4.0

Águas Emendadas Ecological Station: Two Streams, Two Oceans

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Follow the northbound water and it runs into the Maranhão River, a tributary of the Tocantins, which crosses most of central Brazil before reaching the Atlantic beside the mouth of the Amazon — the Tocantins-Araguaia system is conventionally counted within the greater Amazon drai...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Águas Emendadas Ecological Station: When the Fish Change Sides

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Agência Brasília from Brasília, Brasil, CC BY 2.0. The divide is not always a divide. Between December and March the rains come hard, and because the terrain here is so flat, parts of the vereda simply flood. The two drainages briefly touch. Fish move across — species from the Tocantins basin and species from the Paraná basin min...

Image: Agência Brasília from Brasília, Brasil | CC BY 2.0

Águas Emendadas Ecological Station: Protected Before the Suburbs Arrived

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Amcarmelo, CC BY-SA 4.0. The reserve was established in August 1968, when Brasília was eight years old and the northeast corner of the Federal District was still mostly empty. It began at 5,000 hectares and roughly doubled when the Mestre d'Armas lagoon — also known as the Lagoa Bonita — was folded in. I...

Image: Amcarmelo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Águas Emendadas Ecological Station: The Full Cerrado, in One Place

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Agência Brasília from Brasília, Brasil, CC BY 2.0. What the fence protects is a nearly complete cross-section of a biome that has lost most of itself to soy and cattle. Open grassland gives way to scrub, to twisted low woodland, to dry gallery forest along the watercourses and flooded forest where the ground stays wet. Maned wolv...

Image: Agência Brasília from Brasília, Brasil | CC BY 2.0

Águas Emendadas Ecological Station: Fire, Asphalt, and the Cost of Proximity

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Agência Brasília from Brasília, Brasil, CC BY 2.0. Being an island has a price. Five roads cut across the station, and animals are killed on them regularly — a steady, unglamorous drain on populations that have nowhere else to go. Fire is the larger problem. The cerrado evolved with it, and the vegetation blackens in the dry mont...

Image: Agência Brasília from Brasília, Brasil | CC BY 2.0