The Roosevelt River forms the station's eastern edge, the same river that Theodore Roosevelt and Colonel Candido Rondon navigated during their punishing 1913-1914 expedition through what was then completely unmapped territory. To the west lies the Tucuma State Park. To the north, the border between Mato Grosso and Amazonas states also serves as the station's boundary, with the 83,381-hectare Manicor State Forest in Amazonas on the other side. The MT-206 road cuts through the station's southern section, a reminder that even the most protected areas in the Amazon are never fully sealed from the outside world. The station is a unit of the Southern Amazon Mosaic, a cluster of conservation areas that together aim to create a continuous belt of protected habitat.

The station's legal history reads like a contested novel. A 1997 decree established it at roughly 80,915 hectares. A 1999 state law redrew the boundaries, shrinking it to 53,000 hectares. In 2007, another law expanded it to 96,168 hectares and simultaneously enlarged the neighboring Guariba-Roosevelt Extractive Reserve, ostensibly to compensate for environmental losses elsewhere. Then illegal squatters occupied the extractive reserve, a judge revoked the 2007 expansion in 2013, and the state legislature confirmed the rollback in 2015. Yet a decree issued just three months later in April 2015 redefined the station at 96,925 hectares -- larger than ever. Each revision reflected a different political calculation: conservation versus settlement, wilderness versus development, the federal agenda versus state interests.

The terrain inside the station ranges from 90-meter lowlands to the Serra da Fortaleza at 340 meters and the Serra do Pirangueiro at 300 meters. Between these ridges, the landscape unfolds as plateaus with steep edges, rolling hills, and broad river valleys. In the wetter lowlands, dense rainforest with tall canopy trees dominates. Higher up, the vegetation transitions to cerrado -- the open, fire-adapted savanna that characterizes much of central Brazil. The southern portion of the station contains large tracts of seasonally flooded land with low soil fertility, terrain that is poor for farming but excellent for conservation. Its very inhospitability has been its best defense.

Predatory fishing is the station's most persistent internal problem. Illegal fishers are estimated to remove at least three tons of fish annually, depleting populations in rivers that serve as nurseries for species across a much wider watershed. Beyond the boundaries, logging and illegal mining exert constant pressure. The station's location in the proposed South Amazon Ecotones Ecological Corridor would, if fully realized, connect it to a chain of protected areas spanning hundreds of kilometers. For now, the Mato Grosso state government's Conservation Units Coordinator manages the station with support from the Amazon Region Protected Areas Program. The thirty residents and their three communities remain the most constant presence -- a family keeping watch over a forest that, without them, might have fewer witnesses to what is being lost.