Frequency of Fires in the Miombo Woodland of the Gilé National Park. Province of Zambezia

Abstract

Fires occur in a widespread manner in various types of vegetation cover at national level, and are often associated with human hunting, grazing and above all the practice of itinerant agriculture. With the purpose to propose the map of frequency of fire, remote sensing data was collected from 2014 to 2018, using the Moderate Resolution Image Spectroradiometer (MODIS) of the burned area (MCD64A1), which allowed the construction of the map of frequency and intensity of fires, associated with data collected in 59 plots on field. It was observed that the Gilé National Park (PNAG) records an average fire frequency of 0.38 times/year and the return interval of 5.38 years, and an average fire return interval of 2.62 years. During the study period, the PNAG burned 92.8% of the area, which means that on average for each year it burned about 18.56% of its area, there are no significant differences in relation to the area burned per year (p> 0.942037) but there are significant differences in relation to the area burned per month (p <1.24e-07).