Wetland Fire Scar Monitoring and Its Response to Changes of the Pantanal Wetland

Abstract

Fire is an important disturbance factor which results in the irreversible change of land surface ecosystems and leads to a new ecological status after the fire is extinguished. Spanning the period from August to September 2019, the Amazon Forest fires were an unprecedented event in terms of the scale and duration of burning, with a duration of 42 days in the Pantanal wetland. Based on the observation data of wildfire and two Sentinel-2A images separated by a 35-day interval, the objectives of this study are to use the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) to map the spatiotemporal change features of fire and then quantitatively measure the fire severity and the impact of fire on the Pantanal wetland. The overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient of the extracted results of wetland types reached 80.6% and 0.767, respectively, and the statistically analyzed results showed that wildfires did not radically change the wetland types of the Pantanal wetland, because the hydrological variation of the burned area was still the main change factor, with a dynamic ratio of ≤50%. Furthermore, the savanna wetland in the burned area was the wetland type which was most affected by the fire. Meanwhile, fire scars belonged to the moderate and low-severity burned areas, with a maximum burn area of 599 km2. The case enriches the research into the impact of wildfire as the main disturbance factor on the change of wetland types and provides a scientific reference for the restoration and sustainable development of global wetland ecosystems.

Quantifying the post‐fire recovery of taxonomic and functional diversity of dung beetles in the Brazilian Pantanal

“…The Pantanal has immense biodiversity (Tomas et al, 2019), with more than 84% of its territory conserved (Libonati et al, 2020). However, uncontrolled fires have destroyed vast areas of vegetation and caused a significant loss of wildlife (Li et al, 2020; Libonati et al, 2020), putting one of the world's most diverse ecosystems in danger (Marengo et al, 2021). The frequency and severity of fire outbreaks in the Pantanal are worsening, as the climate warms and human impacts increase, such as deforestation and land‐use change (Libonati et al, 2020; Marengo et al, 2021).…”

Fire in Paradise: Why the Pantanal is burning

“…It is not yet possible to have an exact number of animals killed by fire, but it is known that the loss of wildlife is quite significant (Libonati et al, 2020;Li et al, 2020). Fire Brigades report having found dead tuiuiús, armadillos, sucuris and anteaters, many of them charred.…”

“…Here, the role of climate variability in fire activity is important and especially conspicuous during extreme droughts, which exacerbated fire incidence and added to the severity of the problem in the region. Compounding the effects of climate, recurrent spikes in vegetation burning in the Pantanal region is related to anthropogenic activities such as large-scale agriculture and cattle growth (Libonati et al, 2020;Li et al, 2020).…”

Wetland Changes and Their Relation to Climate Change in the Pumqu Basin, Tibetan Plateau

“…Destroyed by human activities such as fire, deforestation and excessive agricultural development, the Pantanal wetlands are seriously threatened [ 10 , 11 ]. In September 2019, the area burned by fire reached 321.1 km 2 [ 12 ]. The wetland area in Canada accounts for 51% of that in North America.…”