Conservation in Brazil needs to include non‐forest ecosystems

In the past decades, Brazil made important progress in the conservation of forest ecosystems. Non‐forest ecosystems (NFE), in contrast, have been neglected, even though they cover large parts of the country and have biodiversity levels comparable to forests. To avoid losing much of its biodiversity and ecosystem services, conservation and sustainable land use policies in Brazil need to be extended to NFE. A strategy for conservation of Brazil's NFE should encompass the following elements: (1) creation of new large protected areas in NFE; (2) enforcement of legal restrictions of land use; (3) extension of subsidy programs and governance commitments to NFE; (4) improvement of ecosystem management and sustainable use in NFE; and (5) improvement of monitoring of land use change in NFE. If Brazil managed to extend its conservation successes to NFE, it not only would contribute significantly to conservation of its biodiversity, but also could take the lead in conservation of NFE world‐wide211214551460CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO - CNPQnão temThis paper was produced as part of a workshop on ‘Conservation of Non‐Forest Ecosystems in Brazil’, held in Jan 2015 in Cambará do Sul, RS, Brazil. The workshop was funded by grant 54417975 of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) ‘TUMBRA: A network for using ecological analysis to deepen our understanding of the relationship between biodiversity and sustainable land use’ to the Technische Universität München and its partner universities UFRGS (Porto Alegre), UFRN (Natal) and UNICAMP (Campinas) in Brazil and received additional sponsoring by Conservation International. CMJ, CRF, GD, GG, TML, SCM and VDP received support from CNPq, Brazil. We thank Joseph W. Veldman, the Associate Editor, and three referees for valuable comments on the manuscrip