World’s largest tropical wetland burned this year

Record-breaking wildfires between January and June burned an ecological foothold — and biodiversity haven — spanning across Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay this year, just four years after similar fires burned 13,300 acres of the preserve.

The Pantanal is considered the world’s largest tropical wetland area, the world’s largest flooded grasslands, and one of the most important areas of freshwater in the world.

NASA captured some of the intense fires’ burn scars in satellite imagery.

“Fire season in southern Brazil usually starts in July and peaks in August and September,” NASA said. “The false-color images emphasize the burn scars (brown) from several of the fires. Unburned vegetation is green. Near- and short-wave infrared bands help penetrate some of the smoke to reveal the hot spots associated with active fires, which appear orange.”

Pantanal fires
Pantanal fires June 2024

The repeated fires have left the environment in a state of constant recovery — and nearby communities are struggling.

“We were just trying to recover from the 2020 fire, which devastated our Pantanal. We had not fully recovered and now we are facing this again,” said a volunteer firefighter with the Baia Negra Environmental Protection Area’s Association of Women Producers.

A recent report from MapBiomas Brazil, a collaborative initiative including NGOs, universities, and technology companies, sheds light on a major cause of the fires: surface water loss.

Edge effects
Edge effects on the native vegetation and continuous habitat — including exposure to wind and solar radiation, susceptibility to fire, increased predation rates, and

The Pantanal is the biome in Brazil that has dried up the most between 1985 and 2023. The report said annual water surface for the area last year was just under 944,000 acres — only 2 percent of the wetland biome was covered by water. The total is reportedly 61 percent under the historical average. The area was 50 percent drier in 2023 than it was in 2018 when the area’s last major flood happened.

“In 2024, we didn’t have a flood peak,” said Eduardo Rosa with  MapBiomas. “The year has seen a peak drought, which should last until September. The Pantanal in extreme drought is already facing fires that are difficult to control.”

The report also found that the entire Amazon region suffered a severe drought with a decrease of 8.2 million acres of water surface.

Up to 25% of Brazil’s native vegetation may be degraded

A new platform from the MapBiomas network shows that between 1986 and 2021 Brazil had between 11 and 25 percent of its native vegetation susceptible to degradation. This corresponds to an area ranging from 60.3 million hectares to 135 million hectares.

Fire effects over time
Visualized fire effects over 7 years, resulting from a single burn or multiple burns.

About 64 percent of Brazil — more than half the country — is covered by native vegetation. The beta version of MapBiomas’ degradation vectors platform makes it possible to generate unprecedented scenarios of the impact of factors that can cause degradation on native vegetation across  Brazil.

“This is the first time that degradation can be assessed in a broader way and in all Brazilian biomes,” says Tasso Azevedo, general coordinator of MapBiomas. “But we know that this degradation process occurs in other types of cover, such as agriculture and pasture, as well as soils and water, where we also intend to advance with this information in MapBiomas in the coming years.”

  ➤ View the main highlights [PDF] of the Degradation module

The degradation vectors considered by the MapBiomas team in this first edition of the platform include the size and isolation of the native vegetation fragments, their edge areas, the frequency of fire and the time since the last burn, as well as the age of the secondary vegetation.

Pantanal: fire as a factor in degradation

In the Pantanal, the degraded area can vary from 800,000 hectares (6.8 percent) to 2.1 million hectares (almost 19 percent). Although it is a biome that coexists with fire, the incidence of fires in the last five years has meant that 9 percent of the Pantanal’s forest formations, which are fire-sensitive areas, have been damaged.

Eduardo Rosa with the MapBiomas’ Pantanal team says some of the vectors of degradation in the Pantanal beyond this analysis must consider the entire biome’s surroundings, since all the rivers that naturally irrigate the Pantanal plain are born in plateau areas. “The removal of native vegetation for agricultural and livestock expansion unprotects the soil and interferes with the distribution of water and sediment. The quantity and quality of water that reaches the plains also depends on dams and hydroelectric plants that alter the natural flow of water,” he says. “Climate issues relating to rainfall and temperature regulate droughts and floods, and the increase in periods of drought has hampered the resilience of the Pantanal ecosystem.”

 

 

Smoke from wildfires turns day into night in Sao Paulo, Brazil

fires wildfires Brazil Bolivia
Map showing heat (the red dots) and smoke in Bolivia and Brazil detected by a satellite August 14, 2019. Click to enlarge.

Smoke from hundreds of fires in the Amazon Basin combined with clouds Monday afternoon to plunge a major South American city into darkness.

Numerous fires in Bolivia and the Amazon Basin in Brazil have been creating smoke in recent days that got pushed hundreds of miles by a cold front to Sao Paulo, turning the sky dark.

Below is an excerpt from an article in the Washington Post:

“The smoke [Monday] didn’t come from fires in the state of Sao Paulo, but from very dense and wide fires that have been happening for several days in [the state of] Rondonia and Bolivia,” Josélia Pegorim, a meteorologist with Climatempo, said in an interview with Globo. “The cold front changed direction and its winds transported the smoke to Sao Paulo.”

The news highlighted the number of forest fires in Brazil, which rose by more than 80 percent this year, according to data released this week by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).

“This central Brazil and south of the Amazon Rainforest region has been undergoing a prolonged drought,” Alberto Setzer, a researcher at INPE, said in an interview with local media outlets. “And there are some places where there has not fallen a drop of rain for three months.”

Most of the Amazon was once considered fireproof, but as climate change and deforestation remake the world, wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity, recent research has shown.

In the Amazon region, according to NASA, fires are rare for much of the year because wet weather prevents them from starting and spreading. However, in July and August, activity typically increases due to the arrival of the dry season. Many people use fire to maintain farmland and pastures or to clear land for other purposes. Typically, activity peaks in early September and mostly stops by November.

The map above, showing heat and smoke in Brazil and Bolivia on August 14, is the best we could find. More recent satellite imagery has either clouds, or smoke so dense over very large areas that smoke from individual fires couldn’t be distinguished from smoke covering very large areas.

Sky lantern sets fire to Olympic venue in Rio

The track and roof of the velodrome used in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro were damaged after a sky lantern landed on the facility. Much of the roof was heavily damaged and photos from TV network Globo showed a 20 to 30 meter section of the track had burned. Wood from Siberia was used to construct the track surface which made it one of the last venues in the Rio Olympics to be ready.

Sky lanterns, also known as Chinese lanterns, are plastic or paper bags lofted by the heat created by burning fuel at the bottom. After they are launched the perpetrator has no control and the dangerous devices are carried wherever the wind blows. Too often they get caught on trees, roofs, cell phone towers, or land on the ground when the flames are still active and start damaging fires. They are banned in most U.S. states and many countries, including Brazil.

Some areas enact specific laws or regulations prohibiting sky lanterns, but they are banned in any state or city that adopts the 2015 edition of the International Fire Code.

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Andrew.
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Wildfire burns near two Olympic venues in Brazil

A wildfire burned close to several Olympic venues in Rio de Janeiro on Monday.

Below is an excerpt from an article in the Brisbane Times:

A forest fire on Monday placed the Olympic mountain biking venue in jeopardy, but games organisers insist the threat has passed.

Spectators arrived at the Olympic hockey centre late on Monday afternoon to find smoke and ash blowing over the venue ahead of the women’s quarter-final between Great Britain and Spain.

The conditions were a result of a fire which a Rio 2016 spokeswoman said started about 4pm near the Deodoro sports complex, home of the equestrian, rugby sevens, shooting, BMX, mountain biking, canoeing, kayaking, women’s basketball and modern pentathlon at these Games.

The spokeswoman said that the fire became more aggressive, placing the mountain bike centre in danger less than a week before it hosts the cross-country races of this year’s calendar.

But according to the spokeswoman, a change of wind direction moved the fire out of harm’s way. She said there had been no injuries as a result of the fire, with firefighters continuing in their attempts to extinguish it as of late on Monday night.

Another fire last week was near the rugby sevens venue.