Large herbivorous mammals (LMH's), once widespread, are now functional or locally extinct in most tropical ecosystems. LMHs exert strong direct and indirect effects on community structure and ecosystem functions, and measuring these effects is important for testing ecological theory and for understanding past, current, and future environmental changes. This, in turn, requires long-term experimental manipulations, due to the slow and often non-linear responses of populations and assemblages to LMH removal. Since 2009, we have maintained the DEFAU-BIOTA experiment, a series of selective exclusions of LMH replicated in a productivity gradient in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil. The objective of the DEFAU-BIOTA experiment is to measure the effects of LMH diversity and abundance on soil carbon and plant functional traits.