Abstract
Abstract. The Brazilian savanna (Cerrado) is one of the most important biodiversity hotspots in the world. Being a fire-dependent biome, its structure and vegetation dynamics are shaped by and rely on the natural occurring fire regime. Over the last decades, Cerrado has been increasingly threatened by accelerated land cover changes, namely the uncontrolled and intense use of fire for land expansion. This is particularly seen in Brazil’s new agricultural frontier in northeastern Cerrado: the MATOPIBA region. Changes in MATOPIBA’s fire regime resulting from this rapid expansion are still poorly understood. Here we use satellite-derived datasets to analyze burned area patterns in MATOPIBA over the last 18 years, at the microregions level. We further evaluate the role of climate and land use in spatial and temporal burned area variability and assess their trends in the last two decades. Results show an increased contribution of MATOPIBA to Cerrado’s total burned area over the last few years: Maranhão and Tocantins present the highest values of total burned area with some microregions burning more than twice its area over the study period. Climate is shown to play a relevant role in MATOPIBA’s fire activity, explaining 52% of the interannual variance, whereas land use and burned area were found to have more complex interactions that are highly dependent on the regional context. Lastly, climate and land use drivers are found to have an overall increasing trend over the last two decades, whereas burned area trends show much heterogeneity within MATOPIBA.
Highlights
Fire events are complex disturbances that influence vegetation dynamics, biodiversity and ecosystem services, in fire-dependent biomes such as Brazilian savannas (Cerrado) (Hardesty et al, 2005)
Tiles of the Burn Date layers were mosaicked and remapped using the Modis Reprojection Tool from National Atmospheric Space Agency (NASA) (Dwyer, Schmidt, 2006). This product was already validated in the Cerrado biome and has been shown to accurately identify burned areas, in northern Cerrado (Rodrigues et al, 2019). 2.3 Datasets of drivers on satellite burned area (SBA) patterns As anthropogenic drivers, we evaluated land use (LU) and climate (CL) effects
MATOPIBA’s importance in the context of fire activity in Cerrado is not to be disregarded as we found that this region represents more than half the annual burned area of the Brazilian savanna
Summary
Fire events are complex disturbances that influence vegetation dynamics, biodiversity and ecosystem services, in fire-dependent biomes such as Brazilian savannas (Cerrado) (Hardesty et al, 2005). Cerrado is one of the most important global biodiversity hotspots and is increasingly threatened partly due to a lack of a consistent fire policy (Durigan, Ratter, 2016). This fire-prone biome relies on fire to shape its vegetation distribution and composition and burns regularly constrained to the annual and seasonal climatological conditions. While climate has been shown to strongly influence fire activity in Cerrado (Silva et al, 2019; Hoffmann et al, 2012), anthropogenic action plays a preponderant role: over the last decades, most human-induced ignitions have been found to be due to increases in land use management, expansion for livestock and agriculture (Song et al, 2018). The role of human activity is relevant in Brazil’s new agricultural frontier, the northern region of Cerrado known as MATOPIBA (Miranda et al, 2014)
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