Wildfire season is back in the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest. Brazil’s portion of the forest saw the most fires in 15 years last month.
Fortunately, scientists can predict where these flames are likely to erupt, so firefighters can respond quickly. Today we’ll talk about how these predictions work and one biologist’s mission to protect the Amazon and other important ecosystems.
The scientist, Lyanna Anderson, has been studying wildfires for more than a decade. She works for Cemaden, Brazil’s disaster warning center, and leads her group of 17 researchers working to predict fires across South America.
This job has a double advantage. Avoiding conflagrations is more than just saving people and property. It saves an important tool in the fight against climate change. This is because trees absorb global warming carbon dioxide and trap it in their trunks, roots and branches. When they burn, their carbon is released into the atmosphere.
To prevent fires, Anderson and her team, which includes scientists from Venezuela, Bolivia and Colombia, start with data from recently deforested areas. This is a very effective indicator of wildfire activity.
The reason is simple. Fire is used to clean up the felled timber, often after trees have been felled in a section of the forest, by ranchers seeking pasture for their livestock. And those fires can get out of control.
“About half of the area that is logged in a given year will burn in the same year,” Anderson said. “The rest is a time bomb that will burn in a year or two.”
With that in mind, she and her team factor in three other variables: above-average temperatures, below-average precipitation, and time of year. The longer the fire season progresses, the drier the forests and the more likely the sparks will turn into raging wildfires.
Forecasting is effective, but not perfect. Large areas can burn even when conditions aren’t favorable to the fire, Anderson said. For example, the forest wasn’t particularly dry when the Amazon fires shocked the world in 2019.
“If people wanted to, they would set fire to the forest,” she said, referring to ranchers, small farmers and expropriators. Understanding the human construct “is part of the methodology we’re trying to improve.”
The team’s latest calculations estimate that about 115 million acres in protected areas of the Amazon rainforest will be highly vulnerable to fire over the next three months. That’s an area larger than Germany.
As climate change causes heat waves and droughts, leading to more frequent and intense wildfires, scientists like Anderson will become increasingly important to authorities trying to avoid deforestation.
One such official, Waldemir Moreira Jr., a fire brigade colonel in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul in midwestern Brazil, said his office was using Anderson’s team’s data to make large-scale He said he has decided in advance where the teams will be placed. The state contains most of the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland. Two years ago, wildfires burned down his fifth of the area.
He said the data “helps us have more resources for prevention”. of fires.
I asked Anderson if he ever felt frustrated that Brazil’s leaders were not doing more to protect the Amazon. I’m here. Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies charged with forest protection suffer from lack of funding and threats of violence from environmental criminals.
Her answer was to describe herself as “too optimistic.” This is a quality I didn’t expect in someone who is incredibly important and has an incredibly difficult job. But it may be necessary.
“We are never disappointed,” she said, explaining how her team cheered when civil servants reached out for their data. I don’t have time to stay.”
Related:
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California’s largest wildfires of the year have been put out after approaching Yosemite National Park.
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The U.S. Forest Service is taking urgent steps to protect giant sequoias from wildfires. About a fifth of them have been destroyed in the last two years.
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Claire O’Neill and Douglas Alteen contributed to Climate Forward.
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