• The Amazon has already seen more forest fires this year than in all of 2019, according to satellite data made available in August 2020 by a new NASA fire analysis tool.
  • While there are several good fire monitoring satellite systems currently at work above the Amazon, NASA’s new automated system provides near real time monitoring which could allow firefighting teams on the ground to pinpoint fires in remote areas and to take action to put fires out before they spread.
  • The new system also differentiates between fires in newly deforested areas, understory forest fires, grassland fires and those set by smallholders to annually clear fields. This differentiation allows authorities to zero in on large scale criminal arson committed by land grabbers, while also preventing the criminalization of subsistence farmers.
  • New information provided by the innovative NASA monitoring tool can count fire carbon emissions and the location and size of burnt areas, all of which could further research on global climate change, mitigation, and biodiversity impacts.
A VIIRS image of the Amazon’s Xingu region on September 8th, including the locations of VIIRS active fire detections. Shown are well-developed fire fronts for active understory fires in the Xingu and the buildup of smoke in the western Amazon. Image from NASA’s WorldView site.

With more than 1,000 major fires already detected this year across the Amazon, impacting the rainforest and Indigenous and traditional communities, scientists are offering a sliver of hope to land managers seeking to curb future fires as new satellite data technologies come online.

For the last month, a single massive wildfire has burned in the Amazon understory, claiming as much of 24,994 hectares (61,762 acres) of pristine rainforest in an area sandwiched between the Jamanxim National Forest and the Baú Indigenous Territory in Pará state, Brazil — both of which are protected areas long subjected to invasions by land grabbers who regularly use fire as a tool to clear and steal public land.

Just this one fire will send almost 3 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere over the coming years as the charred trees die off and decompose, according to new data from a recently launched NASA Amazon fire tool. That’s the equivalent in emissions of 700,000 cars driven for one year.

But here’s the silver lining: as recently as last year, scientists couldn’t have known all of this. Amazon fires have in the past typically been tracked by counting hotspots, which can’t account for the number or size of actual fires, the precise area impacted, carbon emissions, or the kind of fire. While some systems combine hotspot data with aerosol data and other information, none could offer all this information automatically in near real time — until now.

NASA breakthrough

The new Amazon Dashboard fire monitoring tool, initiated August 19 by NASA, boasts some major advances over the way fires were monitored in the past. The platform utilizes automated data collection and computer analysis to identify the number of significant fires burning in the Amazon (instead of just hotspots), what type of fires are burning, and how many new fires start each day. Carbon emissions are counted too.

“As valuable as active fire information is to track monthly or yearly differences, it’s an incomplete picture of what is going on,” Douglas Morton, the chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center responsible for the new tool, told Mongabay.

“Our team wanted to be able to provide more context about the types of fires burning, and the size and growth of those fires over time. Those are critical attributes in terms of the potential to suppress those fires in remote locations.” The new system differentiates fires burning in deforested areas (usually set illegally to convert forest to agricultural land), those burning in the rainforest understory, grassland blazes, and fires set by subsistence farmers annually to clear existing fields.

Understory forest fires — one of the most destructive types of Amazon fire — have gone almost entirely undetected in previous years, as satellites were unable to “see” them. With flames often less than a meter high, understory forest fires seep into dense foliage, burning a trail across the forest floor, often hidden completely by tree canopies towering 40 to 50 meters overhead.

Now, using more sensitive infrared data from nighttime overpasses by the Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 satellites, NASA can now spot these destructive wildfires in near real time.

Brazilian state of Pará on September 8, 2020 with the locations of VIIRS active fires detected by showing both the well-developed fire fronts for active understory forest fires and the buildup of smoke in the western Amazon. Image from NASA’s WorldView site.
NASA’s new fire data analysis tool can help inform operational teams about where and when to fight forest fires. Image by Sérgio Vale/Amazônia Real.

NASA’s quickly accessible and pinpointed data can help land managers identify and suppress forest fires in remote locations before they get too big, while also helping expose perpetrators of large-scale arson. The filtering out of fire used on small-scale family farms and in traditional communities allows enforcement operations to focus exclusively on fighting large-scale criminal deforestation networks, and in preventing and combatting forest fires in high-risk areas.

“It’s groundbreaking. A revolution in our field. We could stop these forest fires and respond quickly,” said Erika Berenguer, a biologist and Amazon expert at Oxford University. “We can [now] separate fires coming from deforestation and agriculture from forest fires, which are much more difficult to detect. In truth, we don’t know how much fire escapes [from newly deforested areas or fields] into the forest, but it’s a considerable proportion.”

NASA’s new fire detection tool comes at a critical time. Finding solutions has never been more urgent, as the Amazon rainforest moves toward a predicted rainforest-to-savanna tipping point — succumbing to climate change induced drought, rampant deforestation, and record breaking annual fires occurring under Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a cheerleader for agribusiness and industrial mining interests in the Amazon region.

Mongabay has also created its own fire dashboard based on MAAP data, which is regularly updated for use in our stories:

Major fires in Brazil in 2020

Fire data from MAAP’s Amazon Fire Monitoring App is updated in real time and will include data from after the publication date

Cartography by Willie Shubert in collaboration with InfoAmazonia.org

Data could help curb future forest fires

Devastating scenes from last year’s Amazon fires shook the world.

But this year’s blazes are already worse than those in 2019, though their harm has been cloaked by the COVID-19 pandemic which has kept media teams out of the remote Amazon.

That’s why, researchers say, the new NASA system couldn’t have come at a better time. “This year, the Amazon has had more forest fires than last year. But you wouldn’t know that by looking at the total number of hot pixels,” said Morton. “Not all fire detections are of equal importance.”

Fires in recently deforested areas, along with understory forest fires, raise the greatest concern among scientists, as they emit the most carbon and cause the most damage to the rainforest and biodiversity.

Liana Anderson, a researcher at the Brazilian Centre for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN), is working with her team on quantifying the impacts of fire in the Amazon. A better understanding of the real cost of Amazon fires, she says, could inform annual budget planning for firefighting and prevention. “In this moment of crisis, we need incentives for science to support decision making and the issues that affect society.”

Estimates based on data from 2008 to 2012 in the Brazilian state of Acre suggest that damage from fires may total 7% of the Amazon’s GDP. “Fire damages infrastructure, such as fencing between farms, electric transmission and roads. Smoke damages health which has a cost. There are also losses to agricultural production, and in rarer cases, [fire] can even interrupt air traffic,” said Anderson. The new NASA monitoring tool could help with these financial damage estimates — economically justifying improved fire control to Brazil’s federal and state governments.

Understory forest fires may start on farms or in pastures, but can escape into standing forest. Fire-damaged trees eventually die, providing fuel and making the forest more vulnerable to future fires. Image by Sérgio Vale/Amazônia Real.

Separating smallholders from Amazon arsonists

This August, in the municipality of Canaã dos Carajás, an isolated fire burned in what was likely a small pasture, according to the NASA Amazon fire data tool. The flames didn’t last long, didn’t affect standing forest, and were characteristic of fire used by small scale landholders to renew the soil on family farms, ensuring the local food supply.

But on July 15, Jair Bolsonaro decreed a 120-day fire ban, making all intentionally set fires in the Amazon illegal until October, with an exception made only for indigenous and traditional communities.

That ban criminalized smallholders and stimulated a disorganized use of fire among poor rural communities, while distracting authorities from large scale illegal land grabbers, says Sonaira Silva, an agronomist at Brazil’s Amazon-based Federal University of Acre.

NASA’s new monitoring tool could help end that problem by differentiating between deforestation blazes and small scale agricultural fires, allowing authorities to filter out low-impact fires and close in on large scale criminal actors in the Amazon.

Amazon fires August 1, 2020 in Brazil’s Pará state (upper right), Mato Grosso (bottom) and Amazonas (upper left). Long vertical brown line to right of center marks the BR 163 Highway which gives easy access to the rainforest and land grabbers. Smoke just to left of BR 163 rises over Jamanxim National Forest illegal burn. Large cleared area to far right edged with smoke is Xingu basin. The smoke to far left is over Tapajós basin. Note how big fires almost always edge deforested areas, indicating likely illegal clearing for cattle ranches. Image courtesy of NASA.
Data for a major forest fire near the Baú Indigenous Territory, compared to what may be a small pasture fire in the Canaã dos Carajás municipality, both in Pará state. The difference in size and impact of the fires demonstrates that fires can be prioritized. Data updated on September 2, 2020. Data from NASA’s Amazon Fire Emissions Database.

“One person burning 1,000 hectares [2,471 acres] is the same as 500 families living off subsistence farming,” Silva told Mongabay following a public webinar held on Amazon fires hosted by the Sustainable Amazon Network (RAS) on September 1.

“We can’t have zero fire in the Amazon. These top-down prohibitions aren’t effective because we need to be able to separate who is who: people causing criminal destruction of the rainforest [for profit] and impoverished family-based smallholders who use fire as their only means of securing food.”

This year’s ban is pushing low-income families to use fire in a disorderly way, increasing the risk of forest fires, Silva says. “They become apprehensive about being fined and feel they can claim the fire wasn’t intentional if it doesn’t look neat. If it’s a perfect rectangle, that becomes difficult.”

Still, a problem remains: the Bolsonaro administration, rather than utilizing the new NASA fire tool, seems intent on discrediting and possibly dismantling INPE, Brazil’s space agency, long responsible for tracking Amazon fires.

Banner Image: A firefighter puts out flames in Acre, in the Brazilian Amazon, August 8, 2020. Image by Sérgio Vale/Amazônia Real.

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