Located along Brazil’s Atlantic coast, the Atlantic Forest encompasses Latin America’s largest population centers, including São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and generates 80 percent of Brazil’s Gross Domestic Product. Coastal development, rapid urbanization, and large-scale agriculture and industry, especially over the last century, have reduced the forest to about 7 percent of its original extent. What remains, however, constitutes one of the greatest repositories of biodiversity on the planet, with more than 20,000 known species of plants alone.