Fire and the sustainability of vegetation recovery in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest

After centuries of deforestation, the Atlantic Forest (AF) stands out as an exception among Brazil’s biomes by having a net gain in natural vegetation cover over recent decades. However, recent studies have highlighted challenges to the sustainability of that vegetation recovery (VR) and shown that AF tree cover is particularly sensitive to burning. Furthermore, warm, dry, and flammable conditions have become more frequent in the AF and the biome’s characteristic dry season has been forecasted to increase in length. Thus, future climate conditions, allied with potential increases in fuel connectivity due to increasing vegetation cover, and human activity, threaten the sustainability of VR in the biome.    

This project will take a cross-scale geospatial approach, from plot-level tree mortality data to the latest biome-wide high-resolution satellite imagery, to evaluate the role of fire (including ignition and suppression due to human activity) in VR across the AF biome. It moves beyond VR studies that have not considered fire and focused on the amount of recovering vegetation, to use spatial analysis with big environmental data to model relationships between spatial configuration of recovering vegetation, climate, land use and contagious fire spread. Better understanding these varied factors and their implications for VR will contribute to necessary policy and management actions to ensure sustainability.