Assessing fire risk and safeguarding Brazil’s biomes: a Multifactorial Approach

Abstract

Forests in Brazil play a crucial role in maintaining ecological balance and the environment, but this has been threatened by deforestation, forest fires, and the effects of climate change. Among these, forest fire has happened frequently in areas where there have been changes in land use for activities of agriculture and livestock farming, that motivate the destruction of forests particularly in biomes like the Amazon and Cerrado. In those biomes, the forest fires initiated to clear land for pasture are the most worrying because promote ecological and socioeconomic consequences, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and impacts the regional flora and biogeochemical cycles. As a strategy to understand and identify areas at risk of forest fires, this study aimed to develop a risk zoning framework for fire hotspots in the biomes of Brazilians. This framework combines multiple variables, incorporating factors like physical terrain, land use, and climatic data, to assess the potential fire risk. The areas with greater fire risk are located in the Caatinga, Cerrado, and Pantanal biomes, in which the physical and climate variables influence directly in incidence and propagation of fire. In the Amazon biome there is a fire risk, some possibly intentional, but can be regulated by elevated precipitation in the region. The identification of areas at high fire risk allows the implementation of proactive strategies for fire prevention for safeguarding Brazil’s biomes and ecosystems, which are integral to the environment and biodiversity.