Forest fires and deforestation in the central Amazon: Effects of landscape and climate on spatial and temporal dynamics

Reis, Mateus; Graça, Paulo Maurício Lima de Alencastro; Yanai, Aurora Miho; Ramos, Camila Julia Pacheco; Fearnside, Philip M.

doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.112310

Cited by 57 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 56 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Because field assessment was outside the scope of the present study, dNBR was primarily used to represent burn severity for spatial an due to its frequent use in the literature and its association with approximate categorical severity levels predefined by the USGS [43]. dNBR was also used by dos Reis et al [19] to map burned areas in Amazonia using satellite imagery from Landsat 8 OLI. Severity categories defined by the USGS are as follows: enhanced regrowth (high), enhanced regrowth (low), unburned, low severity, moderate-low severity, moderate-high severity, and high severity.…”

Section: Burn Severity Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Of fires that burned forest, about 7% also occurred on Recently Deforested areas. Dos Reis et al [19] notes a link between deforestation and fire occurrence in central Amazonia.…”

Section: Frequency and Seasonality By Fire Typementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Drawing from Bowman et al [15] and Guyette et al [16], we define an anthropogenic fire regime as the spatial and temporal patterns of fire intensity, severity, type, and frequency shaped by the interactions between vegetation and human activity. Other studies have suggested that indigenous and protected areas reduce fire frequency based on one or more of these measures [9,[17][18][19]. Fire detection methods using remote sensing to determine fire type have been employed in the literature, but none to the authors' knowledge have utilized verified, up-to-date land cover data on a large scale.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

An analysis of fire dynamics in and around indigenous territories and protected areas in a Brazilian agricultural frontier

Walker

Flores-Anderson

Villa

et al. 2022

Environ. Res. Lett.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sustainable land management is integral to conserving tropical ecosystems and reducing carbon emissions. Human-set fires are part of the land cover change process and are the most common driver of deforestation and carbon emissions in Amazonia. Analyzing the behavior of major fire events provides insight into the effectiveness of current protections. This study aims to quantify the role of Indigenous Territories and Protected Areas (ITPAs) in characterizing anthropogenic fire regimes over the 2020 fire season in Mato Grosso, Brazil. Because of the rapid rate of land cover change and lack of widespread ground validation data in the region, we used a combination of ESA’s Sentinel-5 Precursor Aerosol Index, NASA’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, and high resolution Planet satellite imagery for the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project to analyze spatial and temporal patterns by fire type. ITPAs cover 25% of the study area’s land and contained approximately 20% of significant recorded fires in 2020. Recently deforested areas, forest, grassland, and cropland fires showed varying seasonality and lower frequencies inside ITPAs, but mean fire start dates for all fire types occurred in mid-September. Results suggest that the overall density of major fires is reduced in ITs. PAs only inhibit the density of crop or pastureland fires, but no major fires occurred past 10 km inside their borders. Burn severity of major fires had a weak relationship to distance from ITPAs for some fire types. This study highlights the advantages of near real-time data for individual fire events, provides further evidence of the effect of ITPAs on fire behavior, and demonstrates the importance of adequate protection strategies for mitigating fire activity.

show abstract

Section: Burn Severity Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Of fires that burned forest, about 7% also occurred on Recently Deforested areas. Dos Reis et al [19] notes a link between deforestation and fire occurrence in central Amazonia.…”

Section: Frequency and Seasonality By Fire Typementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

An analysis of fire dynamics in and around indigenous territories and protected areas in a Brazilian agricultural frontier

Walker

Flores-Anderson

Villa

et al. 2022

Environ. Res. Lett.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Furthermore, elevated anthropogenic disturbances result in elevated fire dynamics. This finding has been borne by a body of literature (De Andrade et al, 2020;Dos Reis et al, 2021). Arguably, composite datasets such as the global human modification index (which is based on a cumulative measure of human influence based on eight global human pressures), including road networks (Venter et al, 2016) too can be used for identifying areas at an elevated risk of fires across the Amazonian biome and inform conservation pathways as done by Singh & Yan (2021).…”

Section: Conservation Implications Of the Research Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of how the spatial and temporal patterns of fire and their bioclimatic and anthropogenic drivers vary across the Amazon rainforest in El Niño and non-El Niño years

Singh

Zhu

2021

PeerJ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the past two decades, Amazon rainforest countries (Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Venezuela) have experienced a substantial increase in fire frequency due to the changes in the patterns of different anthropogenic and climatic drivers. This study examines how both fire dynamics and bioclimatic factors varied based on the season (wet season and dry season) El Niño years across the different countries and ecosystems within the Amazon rainforest. Data from publicly available databases on forest fires (Global Fire Atlas) and bioclimatic, topographic and anthropogenic variables were employed in the analysis. Linear mixed-effect models discovered that year type (El Niño vs. non-El Niño), seasonality (dry vs. wet), land cover and forest strata (in terms of canopy cover and intactness) and their interactions varied across the Amazonian countries (and the different ecosystems) under consideration. A machine learning model, Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline (MARS), was utilized to determine the relative importance of climatic, topographic, forest structure and human modification variables on fire dynamics across wet and dry seasons, both in El Niño and non-El Niño years. The findings of this study make clear that declining precipitation and increased temperatures have strong impact on fire dynamics (size, duration, expansion and speed) for El Niño years. El Niño years also saw greater fire sizes and speeds as compared to non-El Niño years. Dense and relatively undisturbed forests were found to have the lowest fire activity and increased human impact on a landscape was associated with exacerbated fire dynamics, especially in the El Niño years. Additionally, the presence of grass-dominated ecosystems such as grasslands also acted as a driver of fire in both El Niño and non-El Niño years. Hence, from a conservation perspective, increased interventions during the El Niño periods should be considered.

show abstract

“…Fires following deforestation to expand agriculture and livestock production as well as the implementation of large infrastructure such as road networks, mining activities, river dams for hydropower generation and urban footprints increased unprecedently in the Amazon basin during the last decades (Davidson et al, 2012;Aragão et al, 2018). Especially during severe hydroclimatic droughts, fires can escape, accidentally or intentionally, into adjacent terrafirme forests (Alencar et al, 2015;Barlow et al, 2020;Brando et al, 2020) and even floodplain forests (Reis et al, 2021), both outside and within protected areas (Nepstad et al, 2006;Silva et al, 2021). This occurs mainly towards the end of the dry season due to the cumulative effect of water deficit, which may expand into the wet season in regions influenced by El Niño (Nepstad et al, 2004;Schöngart et al, 2004;Aragão et al, 2007;Alencar et al, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fires in Amazonian Blackwater Floodplain Forests: Causes, Human Dimension, and Implications for Conservation

Carvalho

Wittmann

Piedade

et al. 2021

Front. For. Glob. Change

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Amazon basin is being increasingly affected by anthropogenic fires, however, most studies focus on the impact of fires on terrestrial upland forests and do not consider the vast, annually inundated floodplains along the large rivers. Among these, the nutrient-poor, blackwater floodplain forests (igapós) have been shown to be particularly susceptible to fires. In this study we analyzed a 35-year time series (1982/1983–2016/2017) of Landsat Thematic Mapper from the Jaú National Park (Central Amazonia) and its surroundings. Our overall objective was to identify and delineate fire scars in the igapó floodplains and relate the resulting time series of annual burned area to the presence of human populations and interannual variability of regional hydroclimatic factors. We estimated hydroclimatic parameters for the study region using ground-based instrumental data (maximum monthly temperature–Tmax, precipitation–P, maximum cumulative water deficit–MCWD, baseflow index–BFI, minimum water level–WLmin90 of the major rivers) and large-scale climate anomalies (Oceanic Niño Index–ONI), considering the potential dry season of the non-flooded period of the igapó floodplains from September to February. Using a wetland mask, we identified 518,135 ha of igapó floodplains in the study region, out of which 17,524 ha (3.4%) burned within the study period, distributed across 254 fire scars. About 79% of the fires occurred close to human settlements (<10 km distance), suggesting that human activities are the main source of ignition. Over 92.4% of the burned area is associated with El Niño events. Non-linear regression models indicate highly significant relationships (p < 0.001) with hydroclimatic parameters, positive with Tmax (R2adj. = 0.83) and the ONI (R2adj. = 0.74) and negative with P (R2adj. = 0.88), MCWD (R2adj. = 0.90), WLmin90 (R2adj. = 0.61) and BFI (R2adj. = 0.80). Hydroclimatic conditions were of outstanding magnitude in particular during the El Niño event in 2015/2016, which was responsible for 42.8% of the total burned floodplain area. We discuss these results under a historical background of El Niño occurrences and a political, demographic, and socioeconomic panorama of the study region considering the past 400 years, suggesting that disturbance of igapós by fires is not a recent phenomenon. Concluding remarks focus on current demands to increase the conservation to prevent and mitigate the impacts of fire in this vulnerable ecosystem.

show abstract

Forest fires and deforestation in the central Amazon: Effects of landscape and climate on spatial and temporal dynamics

Cited by 57 publications

References 56 publications

An analysis of fire dynamics in and around indigenous territories and protected areas in a Brazilian agricultural frontier

An analysis of fire dynamics in and around indigenous territories and protected areas in a Brazilian agricultural frontier

Analysis of how the spatial and temporal patterns of fire and their bioclimatic and anthropogenic drivers vary across the Amazon rainforest in El Niño and non-El Niño years

Fires in Amazonian Blackwater Floodplain Forests: Causes, Human Dimension, and Implications for Conservation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About