Photographer Sebastião Salgado and his wife, Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, launched a rather ambitious restoration project on Salgado's family ranch in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais in 1998. A lot of the 600-hectare (about 1,480-acre) property is largely barren after years of logging, cattle grazing, and erosion. Lélia proposed restoring the land with the native Atlantic Forest that had once covered the region. The couple established the Instituto Terra and began planting native species that were collected from the surrounding ecosystem. Since then, more than 2.7 million native trees have been planted on the property. KfW Development Bank , which has supported the project, says the restored forest protects hundreds of springs now, and has become habitat for many plant and animal species that had disappeared from the area.
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