The need for a consistent fire policy for Cerrado conservation

Abstract

Summary1. The Cerrado is a fire-dependent savanna requiring a clear and urgent fire management policy. The extensive misuse of fire for deforestation or pasture management in Brazil has created an overall perception that its use is always deleterious. This view, reinforced by threats of global warming and climatic change, has lead to current policies of fire suppression. 2. Cerrado ecosystems depend on the historical fire regime to maintain their structure, biodiversity and functioning. The suppression of fire has transformed savanna vegetation into forests, causing biodiversity losses and drastic changes in ecological processes. 3. Policy implications. The National Fire Policy required by law must be urgently implemented in Brazil, including use of fire for Cerrado conservation in public and private lands on the basis of existing knowledge of indigenous people and scientists. Objective regulations on prescribed burning, land manager training, incentives for fire research and experimentation and a broad campaign to disseminate the benefits of fire for Cerrado conservation should be the cornerstones of the policy. If implemented, the policy can give the biodiversity of the Cerrado a future that has previously been severely threatened by fire suppression.

Post-fire reproduction of herbs at a savanna-gallery forest boundary in Distrito Federal, Brazil

“…The fire timing is able to change the flowering phenology of a grassland community (Rissi, 2016) and this changing may be related to the plant physiological status when burning happens (Frost and Robertson, 1987). In Cerrado, fire is an integral component of the biodiversity (Simon et al, 2009) and a fire management policy with prescribed and well-controlled fires at the correct frequency and season (Durigan and Ratter, 2016) would benefit the reproductive activity of some herbaceous species.…”

Understanding patterns of land-cover change in the Brazilian Cerrado from 2000 to 2015

“…The importance of secondary habitats to biodiversity conservation has increasing recognition [7], although investigation of the ecosystem health and diversity of secondary savannahs are few (see [61]). In any case, LUCC analyses of the Cerrado would benefit from improved assessment of both the processes driving encroachment and its extent, which usually results from fire suppression and has raised serious conservation concerns [48].…”

Burned Area Mapping in the Brazilian Savanna Using a One-Class Support Vector Machine Trained by Active Fires

“…It is one of the most important biodiversity hotspots in the world due to species richness and a high percentage of endemism, containing more than 10,000 cataloged plant species [30,31], in which species display morphological and functional dependence from fire [32][33][34]. Several authors have shown that although fire-dependent ecosystems, such as the Cerrado, have evolved in the presence of recurrent natural fires and are dependent on them to maintain their biodiversity, high human pressure through frequent burning may have negative impacts on species diversity [35,36].…”

“…The region is considered a pyrobiome [33] because it is a fire-dependent ecosystem, where the majority of the species evolved in the presence of fire. According to the authors of [7,40], the intra and inter-annual variabilities of fire in the Cerrado are closely related to precipitation variability, but it is worth emphasizing that human activity also plays a prominent role in fire dynamics in this region and cannot be disregarded [33,34].…”