Abstract
Background: Landscape fires in South America have considerable impacts on ecosystems, air quality and the climate system. We examined long-term trends and interannual variability of forest, savanna and agricultural fires for the continent during 2001–2012 using multiple satellite-derived fire products. Results: The annual number of active fires in tropical forests increased significantly during 2001–2005. Several satellite-derived metrics, including fire persistence, indicated that this trend was mostly driven by deforestation. Fires between 2005 and 2012 had a small decreasing trend and large year-to-year changes that were associated with climate extremes. Fires in savannas and evergreen forests increased in parallel during drought events in 2005, 2007 and 2010, suggesting similar regional climate controls on fire behavior. Deforestation fire intensity (the number of fires per unit of deforested area) increased significantly within the Brazilian Amazon in areas with small-scale deforestation. Conclusion: Fires associated with forest degradation are becoming an increasingly important component of the fire regime and associated carbon emissions.
Highlights
We used a satellite-derived time series of active fire counts (FC), burned area (BA) and fire carbon emissions to assess the long-term trends and interannual variability of forest, savanna and agricultural fires in
Fire detections were more numerous in L1 than other deforestation zones, yet active fire densities were higher on a per-area basis with increasing deforestation rates between L1 and L8
Fires & deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon Since a majority of the deforestation area in South America was located in Brazil (Figure 1), we focused on the relationship between annual fire activity and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon based on three levels of annual deforestation: LoDef, MedDef and HiDef
Summary
We used a satellite-derived time series of active fire counts (FC), BA and fire carbon emissions to assess the long-term trends and interannual variability of forest, savanna and agricultural fires in Spatial patterns from other satellites (Supplementary Figure 1), including MYD, VIRS and ATSR, were similar to the MOD observations, the numbers of active fires detected by these sensors varied significantly (Supplementary Tables 1–3).
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