Pampas & Río de la Plata Nature Nonprofits

The pampas is grassland so flat and so fertile that it became one of the world’s great agricultural regions almost as soon as anyone thought to plough it. It runs from the Atlantic across Argentina and Uruguay, and the Río de la Plata, the widest river mouth on Earth, drains it into the sea in a plume of sediment visible from space. Buenos Aires sits on its bank.

Almost none of the original grassland remains. It was converted to cattle and then to soy and wheat with such thoroughness that the pampas is now among the most transformed biomes in the world, and the grassland birds and the pampas deer and the maned wolf hold on in fragments and in the wetter country to the north. The Paraná Delta and the Iberá marshes are the great surviving wetlands, and Iberá has become the site of an ambitious rewilding: jaguars, giant otters, and macaws returned to a place that had lost them.

The organizations here protect the remaining grassland and wetland, drive the Iberá rewilding, and confront the soy frontier that keeps pushing outward into the forests to the north.