Assessment of Fire Dynamics in the Amazon Basin Through Satellite Data

The Amazon region is becoming more vulnerable to wildfires occurring in the dry season, a crisis amplified by climate change, which affects biomass burning across a wide range of forest environments. In this study, we examined the impact of seasonal fire on greenhouse (GHG) emissions over the study region during the last two decades of the 21st century by integrating calibrated and validated satellite-derived products of estimations of burned biomass area, land cover, vegetation greenness, rainfall, land surface temperature (LST), carbon monoxide (CO), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) through geospatial techniques. The results revealed a strong impact of fire activity on GHG emissions, with abrupt changes in CO and NO2 emission factors between early and middle dry season fires (July–September). Among these seven variables analyzed, we found a positive relationship between the total biomass burned area and fire-derived GHG emission factors (r2 = 0.30) due to the complex dynamics of plant moisture and associated CO and NO2 emissions generated by fire. Nevertheless, other land surface drivers showed the weakest relationships (r2~0.1) with fire-derived GHG emissions due to other factors that drive their regional distribution. Our analysis suggests the importance of continued research on the response of fire season to other land surface characteristics that represent the processes driving fire over the study region such as fuel load, composition, and structure, as well as prevailing weather conditions. These determinants drive fire-related GHG emissions and fire-related carbon cycling relationships and can, therefore, appropriately inform policy fire-abatement guidelines.