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Washington, D.C.September 22, 2025
Featured photograph by Lucas Ninno
Growing up in Cuiabá, one of Brazil’s hottest cities, National Geographic Explorer Lucas Ninno would cool off in the waters of Chapada dos Guimarães National Park. An hour’s drive from his home, in a Brazilian savanna vast enough to cover a quarter of the country’s territory, known as the Cerrado, the area became a sanctuary and the foundation of Ninno’s photography career.
Ninno has focused on this savanna for years. The Cerrado, which translates to “closed” in Portuguese and spans 12 states across central Brazil, has been described as an overlooked biome. The swathe covers 772,000 square miles (2 million square kilometres) of Brazil as well as parts of Bolivia and Paraguay, and serves as a crucial water source for Indigenous and local communities and wildlife. It is considered the world’s richest savanna when it comes to biodiversity, yet it receives a fraction of the protection afforded to the Amazon. “We have something like 25% to 28% of the rainforest legally protected. In the Cerrado, this number is like 8%.” More than half of the biome has already been lost and it’s being deforested faster than the Amazon.
“Chuveirinhos” or “sempre-vivas” are species of plants from the Eriocaulaceae family, native to the Brazilian savanna known as the Cerrado. They typically thrive in moist grasslands — areas with waterlogged soils dominated by native grasses — or in rocky outcrops with shallow, nutrient-poor soils.
Photograph by Lucas Ninno
The Cerrado lives at the heart of Brazil’s agricultural expansion, making conservation efforts challenging, says Ninno. “When you fight to protect the Cerrado, you are fighting with more than 60% of Brazil’s Senate deputy chamber members too.” But the goal of his work is to help protect what remains by garnering affection for the Cerrardo and its inhabitants.
“Someone wants to protect polar bears because we’ve created affection for this animal. So, why not do that with animals of the Cerrado?” he reflects. “This is how it happened to me when I was a kid.”
Ninno’s connection to the savanna was inspired by his grandfather’s love for nature. “He wasn’t a biologist; he was just a guy that liked to go into the woods,” Ninno recalls. Together they would disappear into the Cerrado, where he was taught to recognize animal tracks by their scent and heard stories about the local wildlife.
A giant anteater carries her offspring through the savanna of Serra da Canastra National Park. Scientific and activist community highlights the imminent threat posed to the Cerrado’s open grasslands landscapes by the expansion of agriculture, which now dominates more than half of the biome’s original area.
Photograph by Lucas Ninno
He was enamored by photography from a young age — sucked into new worlds through National Geographic magazines in his public school library and then realized photography could be a career. “I saw that maybe it was possible to do that kind of work in my region, but not for National Geographic, that was a very distant dream.”
But it eventually materialized. Ninno learned of a Brazilian photographer living in Chapada dos Guimaraes who had bylines in the magazine. They met in 2011. “I started to dream about ‘maybe one day.’” He took all the jobs he could in news, treating nature photography as a hobby, but the journalism foundation helped him begin thinking about how to build narratives.
Deforested Cerrado area near Grajaú, a city in the state of Maranhão. According to data from Mapbiomas platform, there was a 68% increase in the devastation of Brazil’s savannas in 2023. The loss of native vegetation diminishes the soil’s ability to infiltrate and retain water, directly impacting the water levels in rivers, especially during the drier months.
Photograph by Lucas Ninno
In 2019, Ninno was among the first photographers on the scene of Brazil’s Brumadinho Dam disaster, which resulted in a mudslide that flattened villages, caused widespread environmental damage and killed nearly 300 people. Ninno’s powerful documentation of the catastrophe led to his first National Geographic Brazil feature, and eventually, his long-term cataloging of the Cerrado. He had covered other catastrophes prior, like Chile’s historic wildfire tragedy in Valparaiso.
“It’s important to show the pictures of the forest burning and how this affects people’s life. But sometimes I think that we lack showing and creating affection in people. So this is a very important goal of the work I do today.”
The striking eyes of a blue-and-yellow macaw, surrounded by the vibrant colors of its feathers, are a symbol of the rich biodiversity found in the Cerrado. This species, which ranges from Central America to Paraguay and Argentina, finds ideal living conditions in the Cerrado, feeding and nesting in the palm trees that grow around the biome’s numerous springs.
Photograph by Lucas Ninno
The eyes and feathers of a macaw, swaths of Cerrado greenery, portraits of the Krĩkati Indigenous community — who call themselves Põocatiji, which means, “the people who dominate the Cerrado” — and 27,000-year-old cave paintings live in a photographic library Ninno builds as a bridge between humans and nature.
His advice to aspiring photographers is “it’s easy to say ‘follow your dreams,’ but you need to have a very solid base in order to follow your dreams,” he says as a proponent of relying on a strong mental health support system, and practically, a base income. Ninno’s first interaction with a camera wasn’t with his own, but one he borrowed from a friend during a small workshop in a cultural center of his city. He sold possessions to eventually afford his own “very simple camera.”
And the Cerrado, he says, shows signs of optimism for its future. “You don’t have to do a lot to impress people about its scientific value, or its visual value, or its biodiversity. The place speaks by itself, we just have to do a little more to show that.”
Paintings made with mineral pigments represent humans and Cerrado’s animals at the Santa Elina archaeological site. With artifacts dating back 27,000 years, the site located in Mato Grosso state is the oldest in the cerrado biome and the second oldest in Brazil. Excavations found tools and utensils in the same stratum as bone fragments of Pleistocene megafauna animals, such as the giant sloth, revealing that the human groups that sheltered there interacted with these extinct species of the Americas.
Photograph by Lucas Ninno
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Natalie Hutchison is a Digital Content Producer for the Society. She believes authentic storytelling wields power to connect people over the shared human experience. In her free time she turns to her paintbrush to create visual snapshots she hopes will inspire hope and empathy.
About The National Geographic Society
The National Geographic Society is a global nonprofit organization that uses the power of science, exploration, education and storytelling to illuminate and protect the wonder of our world. Since 1888, National Geographic has pushed the boundaries of exploration, investing in bold people and transformative ideas, providing more than 15,000 grants for work across all seven continents, reaching 3 million students each year through education offerings, and engaging audiences around the globe through signature experiences, stories and content.
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