Indigenous seed network restoring Brazil's Amazon and Cerrado

Story: 2023 C.E. | Last updated: August 27, 2026

Across the Brazilian states of Rondônia and Mato Grosso, Indigenous women are doing something quietly extraordinary: collecting, cleaning, and trading native seeds to restore the forests and savannas their communities depend on. Their work sits at the heart of one of the largest ecological restoration efforts on Earth — and it is growing.

At a glance

Indigenous seed network: Reseba, the Amazonian Bioeconomic Seed Network, was founded in mid-2021 C.E. by members of six Indigenous peoples — the Aikanã, Gavião, Sabanê, Suruí, Tupari, and Zoró — and now coordinates 146 seed collectors across Rondônia.
Xingu Seed Network: Brazil’s oldest seed collector association, founded in 2007 C.E., today includes around 600 members from 25 Indigenous groups as well as family farmers and urban residents. From its founding through 2022 C.E., it collected 294 metric tons of seeds and helped restore 18,300 acres of Amazon and Cerrado land.
Restoration target: Brazil has committed to restoring 30.9 million acres of native vegetation by 2030 C.E., including 11.9 million acres in the Amazon and 5.2 million acres in the Cerrado — goals that seed collector networks are uniquely positioned to support.

A thousand miles for knowledge

This past July, 15 Indigenous women traveled roughly a thousand miles from Rolim de Moura, in the Amazonian state of Rondônia, east to Nova Xavantina, in Mato Grosso — a day’s journey to where the Amazon gives way to the Cerrado savanna. They came as representatives of Reseba to meet and learn from the Xingu Seed Network.

The exchange was practical and hands-on. Milene Alves, 25, a biologist who has worked with the Xingu Seed Network since she was 16, walked the visitors through Nova Xavantina’s public squares, pointing out parent trees: angelim, angico, cashew, tamboril, and ipê. Along the BR-251 highway, remnant jatobás-do-cerrado and baru trees still stand on some rural properties, with landowners granting access — a challenge that urban seed collectors often face.

The group learned how to select fallen fruit from the baru tree, how to use a bamboo pole with an iron hook to collect jatobás-do-cerrado from roadside specimens, and how to process seeds for storage. Caroba seeds were dried in the sun before being cut open with a machete. Garapa seeds were rubbed through a sieve with a flip-flop to separate them. Jatobás-do-cerrado were placed on a tarpaulin and driven over with a car to crack them open. The seeds were then sorted into batches and stored in cool, dark, dry seed houses.

“The seed collector’s eye has to be meticulous,” Alves said.

What these networks make possible

Seed collector networks are a foundational part of the restoration chain. Without a steady, quality supply of native seeds, nurseries cannot grow saplings, and restoration projects cannot begin.

Ecoporé, the nonprofit NGO that helped found Reseba, grows 600,000 saplings a year at its nursery in Rolim de Moura. “Reseba was created to coordinate the buying and selling of seeds with Indigenous groups and to supply both the nursery’s needs and the state’s demand,” said Aline Smychniuk, one of Reseba’s socioenvironmental analysts.

The Xingu Seed Network shows what a mature network can achieve. Over 15 years, its collectors earned a cumulative total of 5.3 million reais — roughly $1.05 million — demonstrating that restoration can generate real, sustained income for Indigenous and rural communities. The network pioneered the muvuca method, in which a mix of seeds from up to 80 species is sown directly into the soil, a technique now used across Brazil.

Reseba, still in its early years, is learning from that model. During the Nova Xavantina visit, the women from Rondônia were struck by the role of the elo — the “link” leader who coordinates between individual collectors and the broader network, manages quality control, and handles payment distribution. Reseba has adopted a similar structure.

For Rubithem Suruí, 27, a leader among the women of her village of Gamir in the Sete de Setembro Indigenous Territory, the work carries meaning beyond income. “We’ve already been to see the mother trees, to see how many trees have seeds ready to harvest, and we will collect whatever they request,” she said. The seed harvest, she added, will allow women in her community to earn income and gain autonomy while reducing pressure on local resources.

This kind of community-led restoration is part of a larger wave of reforestation progress happening across Brazil and around the world, driven as much by grassroots networks as by government programs.

The scale of what needs to be done

The backdrop to this work is urgent. Agriculture accounted for 95.7% of Brazil’s deforestation in 2022 C.E., according to the MapBiomas network. Over the past decade, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) recorded 20.4 million acres of deforestation in the Amazon and 22.2 million acres in the Cerrado — together an area roughly the size of Uruguay.

Luciana Gatti, a researcher at INPE, has warned that stopping deforestation alone may not be enough to prevent the Amazon from crossing the tipping point at which it unravels into dry savanna. Studies suggest this could happen if deforestation reaches 20–25% of the entire Amazon; the current figure stands at 17%. Parts of the Amazon now emit more carbon dioxide than they absorb.

“We’re heading ever faster toward collapse,” Gatti said. “It’s not just about stopping deforestation, we also have to restore the forest that has been lost.”

In Nova Xavantina itself, 128,500 acres of savanna and rainforest have been converted for agriculture, causing a 20% loss of vegetation. The area devoted to soybean production has tripled since 2000 C.E.

Obstacles that remain

Progress is real, but significant barriers remain. Brazil’s Forestry Code, approved in 2012 C.E., requires landowners to address environmental liabilities on more than 49.4 million acres of land eligible for restoration. But in 2023 C.E., Congress changed the deadline for joining the Environmental Regularization Program to a rolling individual timeline, creating uncertainty for seed networks that depend on stable demand from landowners. “The landowner has a piece of land that needs to be restored, but holds onto it and waits for a change in the Forestry Code,” Alves said.

Seed collectors in Rondônia also face physical threats. The Sete de Setembro Indigenous Territory has suffered attacks from illegal miners, illegal loggers, and land grabbers, according to Rubithem Suruí. Between 2018 C.E. and 2022 C.E., the territory lost 6,716 acres to deforestation, and collectors must pass through land occupied by invaders to reach mother trees.

Brazil’s National Plan for the Recovery of Native Vegetation, known as Planaveg, was shelved under the previous administration. The current government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is working to revive it, including the commission that oversees restoration policy. Rita de Cássia Mesquita, secretary for biodiversity in the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, told Mongabay that forestry extension — practical, on-the-ground support for landowners and collectors — will be fundamental to the plan’s success.

Until that support arrives at scale, grassroots exchanges like the one between Reseba and the Xingu Seed Network remain the most reliable way for newer networks to grow. “This time around, we learned a lot,” said Dorvalina Sabanês, a resident of the Tubarão/Latundê Indigenous Territory whose community’s first attempt at seed collection, years earlier, had failed for lack of guidance. She returned home ready to bring her relatives in.

One seed at a time, one network at a time, these women are rebuilding the forest — and finding that the knowledge travels best person to person, across a thousand miles of road.

For more on this story, see: Mongabay — Indigenous seed collectors grow a network of restoration across Brazil

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