First Major Fire Confirmed In Brazilian Amazon Basin, Three Months Ahead Of Schedule
Researchers have detected the “first major fire of 2020” in the Brazilian Amazon three months ahead of the fire season, while other scientists warn that there could be a “catastrophe” in the region if the peak of fires and COVID-19 overlap.
Using a new application that combines fire alerts from NASA with satellite data tracking bursts of air pollution collected by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) detected on May 28 a pulse of emissions and fire alerts in the same area of the state of Mato Grosso, in the southeastern Amazon region. Then, as the researchers zoomed in on imagery from Earth-imaging service Planet, they saw smoke rising from a block of land that had been deforested in 2019. “We show for the first time what the actual deforestation looks like in 2020,” Matt Finer, an ecologist and the director of MAAP, an initiative of the Amazon Conservation Association, said in an interview. On June 8, the team discovered the second fire of the year, also in Mato Grosso.
Images from Planet show the progression of deforestation in 2019 and subsequent fire in 2020. Image courtesy of MAAP with data from Planet.
EDIT
Also on May 29, the MAAP team identified several places where recent deforestation suggests that fires could follow this year. Their analysis reveals a loss of about 1,500 square kilometers (580 square miles) of primary forest since the beginning of 2020. Some of the individual areas are huge, Finer added, with one plot reaching nearly 60 km2 (23 mi2) — about the size of the country of San Marino near Italy.
Rising deforestation in the Amazon between August 2019 and May 2020, which is already nearly 90% of what occurred in the year between August 2018 and July 2019, adds a red flag to the current scenario, Luiz Aragão of INPE and his colleagues noted in a report. In addition to those newly cleared areas, many places in the Amazon were deforested in 2019 but haven’t yet been burned. Part of the reason was the worldwide furor over the fires, which pushed the government to respond to half the problem, Aragão said. “Last year, the government tried to control fire but forgot the deforestation,” he said.
EDIT
https://news.mongabay.com/2020/06/overlap-of-fire-covid-19-peaks-a-catastrophe-for-brazils-amazon/