ABSTRACT
Paraguay is an ecologically diverse, landlocked country occupying 406,752 km2 in south central South America (S 19° to 28°, W 54° to 63°). It is bordered to the northwest by Bolivia, South America’s only other landlocked country; Argentina to the south and west; and Brazil to the north and east. Paraguay is bisected by the river bearing its name (i.e., Rio Paraguay), which divides the country into two distinct geographical regions. East of the drainage basin, most areas of the country were historically part of the inland Atlantic Forest ecoregion (Cartes and Yanosky 2003). However, an extensive cerrado-forest mosaic still exists in the north of this ecoregion, which is contiguous with the much larger Brazilian Cerrado ecoregion. Close to the Rio Parana in the southeast, pockets of grassland (pampas) and wetlands mark the northern extension of these habitats from Argentina, where they occupy a much greater area (Figure 17.1).
