Contrasting Post-Fire Dynamics between Africa and South America based on MODIS Observations

Abstract

Fire is an important driver of land cover change throughout the world, affecting processes such as deforestation, forest recovery and vegetation transition. Little attention has been given to the role of fire in shaping the temporal and spatial land cover changes among continents. This study has integrated two MODIS products (MCD64A1: Burned area and MCD12Q1: Land cover) over Africa and South America from 2001–2013 to explore the vegetation dynamics after fires. The results indicated that while Africa suffered from repeated fires, more than 50% of the total burned area in South America experienced only one fire. The vegetation dynamics of the high-density vegetated regions in the 10 years after a fire showed that the forest losses in the first year after a fire in Africa were slightly larger than that in South America (Africa: 17.2% vs. South America: 14.5% in the Northern Hemisphere). The continental comparison suggested that early successional forests in Africa recovered relatively fast (northern part: 10.2 years; southern part: 12.8 years) than in South America, which recovered (18.4 years) slowly in Northern Hemisphere or ever with no recovery in the Southern Hemisphere. No clear information of the recoveries of other vegetation types (i.e., shrub, grass and crop) in Africa or South America could be identified from the satellite data. In addition, we also analyzed the changes of high-density vegetation in non-burned regions in both continents. These findings highlighted the impact of the fire regime on the vegetation changes in Africa, which appear resilient to fire, but there were complex systems in South America related to fires.

Fire-induced loss of the world’s most biodiverse forests in Latin America

“…This association may indicate that fires are agents of loss (i.e., humans use fire to deforest), a common cause drives more fires and deforestation (e.g., climate change makes wildfires more common and people opportunistically deforest the burnt area), or some combination of both. Previous studies of postfire vegetation dynamics have found most South American forests can be severely affected by single fires and therefore recover only very slowly, requiring up to two decades to grow back ( 35 ). While statistical analyses confirm persistence is frequent enough after a single fire (Fig.…”

The “New Transamazonian Highway”: BR-319 and Its Current Environmental Degradation

“…It did not vary even in periods of extreme drought or periods of higher rainfall, thus attesting to human interference in the environment. According to the classification determined by Oliveira-Júnior et al [32], the SPI values in 2009, 2014, 2016, and 2017 were considered normal. For the positive SPI values, 2013 was a year of high rainfall, and 2019 was a year of severe rainfall.…”

“…Dynamic thresholds were then applied to guide the statistical characterization of burn-and non-burn-related changes. Finally, spatial and temporal active fire information was used to create regional probability density functions to classify each pixel as burned or unburned [32].…”

Fires Drive Long-Term Environmental Degradation in the Amazon Basin

“…The algorithm identifies the date of burn for the 500 m grid cells within each individual MODIS tile. The date is encoded in a single data layer as the ordinal day of the calendar year during which the burn occurred, with values assigned to unburned land pixels and additional special values reserved for missing data and water grid cells [73,74].…”