Fire and land use in recent years in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil

Abstract

The biome Atlantic Forest in Brazil covers a substantial portion of the country, where a large population and major cities are located. In spite of the substantial influence from human activities, the region is one of the most diverse tropical ecosystems with a large number of endemic species, and it is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspot. In this region, fire is an important disturbance, due to its strong effects on nutrient cycling, vegetation succession, and atmospheric emissions of gases and aerosols, and therefore must be considered when planning on the sustainability of the region. This study presents a set of initial analyses of fire occurrence in respect to different types of land cover and use as classified by the recent Brazilian MapBiomas Project (http://mapbiomas.org). Information on fire occurrence are from remote-sensing with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Collection 6 Active Fire Product. The data on fires data are for years 2001-2017. The selected data on land cover and use are for year 2010, nearly at the middle of the fire data time spam. For analyses, both datasets were aligned in space and aggregated at 0.5-deg spatial resolution. It was found that in average, most of fires happened during months with less precipitation, as expected. In comparison with other major biomes in Brazil, the density of fire detections in the Atlantic Forest was lower, but still a substantial number of fires are detected yearly in the region. Perhaps, more important is the fact that despite of most of fires detected with MODIS occurred in areas dominated by agriculture and pasture (as expected by the general relations between fire and land use in Brazil), a relatively high number of fires were detected in areas dominated by natural forests. That has important consequences for the high interest in conservation of the study region, based on its marked biodiversity and potential for providing relevant ecosystem services to society.