Amazon burning: locating the fires

10 de September de 2019

Sep 10, 2019

Ane Alencar, Paulo Moutinho, Vera Arruda, Camila Balzani, João Ribeiro

The Brazilian Amazon is still on fire. The 2019 burning season, which captured the attention of Brazil and the world in recent weeks, is not over yet. Government action at the federal and state levels in the fight against wildfires is still essential, just as it is essential to curb the source that feeds it: deforestation. Failing immediate action, the whole region will continue to suffer from high numbers of outbreaks from September on.

But where is the deforestation to feed so many outbreaks taking place? This technical memo discusses which land use categories saw the greatest number of outbreaks along with the increase in deforestation in each.

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Fire, fragmentation, and windstorms: A recipe for tropical forest degradation

Fire, fragmentation, and windstorms: A recipe for tropical forest degradation

Widespread degradation of tropical forests is caused by a variety of disturbances that interact in ways that are not well understood. To explore potential synergies between edge effects, fire and windstorm damage as causes of Amazonian forest degradation, we quantified vegetation responses to a 30‐min, high‐intensity windstorm that in 2012, swept through a large‐scale fire experiment that borders an agricultural field. Our pre‐ and postwindstorm measurements include tree mortality rates and modes of death, above‐ground biomass, and airborne LiDAR‐based estimates of tree heights and canopy disturbance (i.e., number and size of gaps). The experimental area in the southeastern Amazonia includes three 50‐ha plots established in 2004 that were unburned (Control), burned annually (B1yr), or burned at 3‐year intervals (B3yr).