Critical remote sensing of Indigenous fire use in Guyana

Controlled fire use plays an important cultural role within small-scale livelihoods and Indigenous cultures. However, regional-scale estimates of burned area have likely omitted many human fires, as they are typically smaller than the minimum size that existing global remote sensing products have been able to detect. As detection of small fires improves, interpreting the patterns revealed will require understanding of human fire use, given that many of the newly detected fires will likely be anthropogenic. At the same time, calls for decolonising remote sensing recognise the embedding of power within the production and analysis of remotely sensed data, and call for the integration of satellite-borne data with traditional Indigenous knowledge in ways that benefit local communities. This research will focus on the Rupununi in the south-west of Guyana, a seasonally flooded region of savannas, forest and wetlands. The main research questions are:

How can Indigenous knowledge improve environmental ground truthing of remotely sensed fire datasets?

How does situated Indigenous fire use mapping compare with “neutral” spaceborne fire datasets?

How do Indigenous knowledge perspectives of environment and fire use within the context of climate change compare with modelled bioclimatic variables?

These will be explored through a combination of participatory mapping with geospatial analysis of remotely sensed datasets and analysis of high resolution (1 km) bioclimatic variables.