Climate Warming Leads to Increased Forest Burn Area and Deep Forest Penetration in Amazon

Authors

Lin Meng¹* (lin.meng@vanderbilt.edu), Jeffrey Chambers², Charles Koven², Gilberto Pastorello³, Paulo Brando⁴, Marcos Longo², Luiz Aragão⁵, Jacquelyn Shuman⁶, Robinson Negron-Juarez², Bruno Gimenez⁷, Aline Pontes-Lopes⁵, Barbara Bomfim², Alessandro Araujo⁸

Institutions

¹Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN; ²Earth and Environmental Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA; ³Scientific Data Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA; ⁴Department of Earth System Science, University of California–Irvine, CA; ⁵Earth Observation and Geoinformatics Division, National Institute for Space Research, São José dos Campos, Brazil; ⁶Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO; ⁷National Institute of Amazonian Research, Manaus, Brazil; ⁸Embrapa Amazônia Oriental, Belém, Pará, Brazil

URLs

• https://ngee-tropics.lbl.gov/

Abstract

Amazonian fires have become more frequent and widespread under climate change, exerting a profound impact on society and ecosystems. In addition, edge effect promotes canopy loss and facilitates anthropogenic fires to escape into the forests, intensifying carbon losses. However, it is unclear how increases in extreme climate and forest edge area affects fire occurrence and spread. This study investigated the influence of land surface temperature (LST) on burn areas of evergreen forest across the Amazon basin from 2000 to 2020. The burn area of evergreen forest increased exponentially with the increase in LST from July to October. The forest edge was warmer and often had more burn areas than forest far from the edge (>8 km). Higher LST (>36 °C) is strongly correlated with more burn areas and deeper forest penetration distance from the edge. These findings indicate forest degradation leads to higher vulnerability at forest edges under a warmer and drier climate in the Amazon.