Linking research and management: studying the fire regime of Caatinga- Cerrado ecotone (Piauı́, Brazil) to propose orientations for policymakers of protected areas

ARGIBAY, DAIHANA S.; SPARACINO, JAVIER; ESPINDOLA, GIOVANA M.

Campo Grande

Conferencia; 7ª Conferência Internacional de Incêndios Florestais; 2019

Ibama

Thestudy of fire regimes in seasonal semiarid ecosystems can improve theunderstanding of fire dynamics and help to establish orientations formanagement. With this purpose, we aimed to evaluate seasonal andannual patterns of fire occurrence and recurrence, and the spectralresponse of the vegetation in the Capivara-Confusões Mosaic ofprotected units, located in the transition between Caatinga andCerrado ecosystems of northeastern Brazil. We characterized fireoccurrence from 1999 to 2017, delineating fire scars in 306 Landsatimages. Fire seasons were separated in rainy seasons, and early,middle and late dry seasons, by analyzing daily precipitationanomalies. In the 19-year long period considered, 48% of the area wasburned, 36% of the fires occurred during the middle dry season, whilesimilar dimensions were burned during the rainy and late dry seasons(4 and 7%, respectively), and there were almost no fires in the earlydry season. Four months after the end of the rainy season, betweenSeptember and October, begins the more risky period that extendsuntil December. Control and mitigation actions should be increased inthese months of the middle dry season, and continue during the latedry season and first months of the rainy season, even after thebeginning of the rains. Great biomass accumulation during one or morewet rainy seasons, followed by a poor rainy season (sometimes relatedwith droughts) that leads to low water content in the accumulatedbiomass, increases the chances oflargeburned areas in the subsequent dry season, and thus reinforcedmonitoring is highly recommended to avoid big fires. Areas withrecurrent fire in the period were always burned with at least onefire-free year in between, and were mostly located near to roads,settlements or cities, and limited by topographic barriers. Thisspacial distribution could help to implement prevention andpunishment actions to reduce the use of fire during high-riskperiods. Furthermore, we found that the Caatinga-Cerrado ecotonevegetation has a sensitive spectral response to seasons and fire,which suggests that automatic methods for fire detection thatintegrate spectral indices could also be implemented for managementin this area. p { color: #00000a; text-align: justify; orphans: 0; widows: 0; margin-bottom: 0.08in; direction: ltr; background: transparent }p.western { font-family: "Malgun Gothic", serif; font-size: 10pt; so-language: en-US }p.cjk { font-family: "Malgun Gothic"; font-size: 10pt; so-language: ko-KR }p.ctl { font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 11pt; so-language: ar-SA }a:link { color: #0563c1; text-decoration: underline }