Potential aboveground biomass increase in Brazilian Atlantic Forest fragments with climate change.

Fragmented tropical forest landscapes preserve much of the remaining biodiversity and carbon stocks. Climate change is expected to intensify droughts and increase fire hazard and fire intensities, thereby causing habitat deterioration, and losses of biodiversity and carbon stock losses. Understanding the trajectories that these landscapes may follow under increased climate pressure is imperative for establishing strategies for conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Burning in southwestern Brazilian Amazonia, 2016-2019.

Fire is one of the most powerful modifiers of the Amazonian landscape and knowledge about its drivers is needed for planning control and suppression. A plethora of factors may play a role in the annual dynamics of fire frequency, spanning the biophysical, climatic, socioeconomic and institutional dimensions. To uncover the main forces currently at play, we investigated the area burned in both forested and deforested areas in the outstanding case of Brazil's state of Acre, in southwestern Amazonia.

Effects of climate and land-use change scenarios on fire probability during the 21st century in the Brazilian Amazon.

The joint and relative effects of future land-use and climate change on fire occurrence in the Amazon, as well its seasonal variation, are still poorly understood, despite its recognized importance. Using the maximum entropy method (MaxEnt), we combined regional land-use projections and climatic data from the CMIP5 multimodel ensemble to investigate the monthly probability of fire occurrence in the mid (2041-2070) and late (2071-2100) 21st century in the Brazilian Amazon. We found striking spatial variation in the fire relative probability (FRP) change along the months, with October showing the highest overall change.

Vulnerability of Amazonian forests to repeated droughts.

Extreme droughts have been recurrent in the Amazon over the past decades, causing socio-economic and environmental impacts. Here, we investigate the vulnerability of Amazonian forests, both undisturbed and human-modified, to repeated droughts. We defined vulnerability as a measure of (i) exposure, which is the degree to which these ecosystems were exposed to droughts, and (ii) its sensitivity, measured as the degree to which the drought has affected remote sensing-derived forest greenness.

Disentangling the contribution of multiple land covers to fire-mediated carbon emissions in Amazonia during the 2010 drought.

In less than 15 years, the Amazon region experienced three major droughts. Links between droughts and fires have been demonstrated for the 1997/1998, 2005, and 2010 droughts. In 2010, emissions of 510 ± 120 Tg C were associated to fire alone in Amazonia.