The number of active fires recorded in the Brazilian Amazon in August-September 2022 was the highest since 2010, according to an article published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Besides the record number of fires (74,398), the researchers found they were due not to extreme drought, as in 2010, but to recent deforestation by humans.
Half of the Amazon is typically vulnerable to fire in the two-month period analyzed. Human action was the main cause of the recent destruction. Credit: Gabriel de Oliveira/University of South Alabama
"The idea of publishing our findings came up when we analyzed data provided free of charge by the Queimadas program," said Guilherme Mataveli, first author of the article. 'Queimadas' in Portuguese means burnings, and he was referring to the forest fire monitoring service run by the National Space Research Institute (INPE). Mataveli is currently a postdoctoral researcher in INPE's Earth Observation and Geoinformatics Division.
The number of fires typically rises every year in August and September, when the weather favors fire in about half of the Amazon. "But the surge in the number of fires in 2010 was due to an extreme drought event that occurred in a large part of the region, whereas nothing similar occurred in 2022, so other factors must have been to blame," Mataveli said.
Mataveli's main research interest is the influence of land use and land cover on emissions of fine particulate matter from fire in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes using modeling and remote sensing.
The researchers also analyzed the locations of the fires detected using data provided free of charge by another INPE platform, TerraBrasilis. Their analysis showed that 62% occurred in recently deforested areas; that the number of fires in recently deforested areas in August-September 2022 rose 71% compared…
Ricardo Muniz
phys.org