Synergisms among Fire, Land Use, and Climate Change in the Amazon

Cochrane, Mark A.; Laurance, William F.

doi:10.1579/0044-7447-37.7.522

Cited by 213 publications

(216 citation statements)

References 69 publications

(93 reference statements)

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“…5). Nonetheless, most of the fires were ignited by human activities (Nepstad et al, 1999;Cochrane and Laurance, 2008). Fires occurred mostly in the cerrado, C3 type, and C4 type grasscovered areas, but forest fires with much higher biomass density are typically responsible for the highest amount of biomass burning aerosols and trace gases released into the atmosphere.…”

Section: Soil Moisture and Fire Activitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling the radiative effects of biomass burning aerosols on carbon fluxes in the Amazon region

et al. 2017

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Abstract. Every year, a dense smoke haze covers a large portion of South America originating from fires in the Amazon Basin and central parts of Brazil during the dry biomass burning season between August and October. Over a large portion of South America, the average aerosol optical depth at 550 nm exceeds 1.0 during the fire season, while the background value during the rainy season is below 0.2. Biomass burning aerosol particles increase scattering and absorption of the incident solar radiation. The regional-scale aerosol layer reduces the amount of solar energy reaching the surface, cools the near-surface air, and increases the diffuse radiation fraction over a large disturbed area of the Amazon rainforest. These factors affect the energy and CO 2 fluxes at the surface. In this work, we applied a fully integrated atmospheric model to assess the impact of biomass burning aerosols in CO 2 fluxes in the Amazon region during 2010. We address the effects of the attenuation of global solar radiation and the enhancement of the diffuse solar radiation flux inside the vegetation canopy. Our results indicate that biomass burning aerosols led to increases of about 27 % in the gross primary productivity of Amazonia and 10 % in plant respiration as well as a decline in soil respiration of 3 %. Consequently, in our model Amazonia became a net carbon sink; net ecosystem exchange during September 2010 dropped from +101 to −104 TgC when the aerosol effects are considered, mainly due to the aerosol diffuse radiation effect. For the forest biome, our results point to a dominance of the diffuse radiation effect on CO 2 fluxes, reaching a balancePublished by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. 14786 D. S. Moreira et al.: Modeling the radiative effects of biomass burning aerosols of 50-50 % between the diffuse and direct aerosol effects for high aerosol loads. For C3 grasses and savanna (cerrado), as expected, the contribution of the diffuse radiation effect is much lower, tending to zero with the increase in aerosol load. Taking all biomes together, our model shows the Amazon during the dry season, in the presence of high biomass burning aerosol loads, changing from being a source to being a sink of CO 2 to the atmosphere.

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Section: Soil Moisture and Fire Activitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling the radiative effects of biomass burning aerosols on carbon fluxes in the Amazon region

et al. 2017

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“…And that is not the only problem: just as serious as outright deforestation is fragmentation, which happens when loggers, ranchers and farmers move in. In Brazil, up to 38,000 kilometres of new forest edge are created each year 3 .…”

Section: The First Cutmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deforestation: Carving up the Amazon

Fraser¹

2014

Nature

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“…Conversely, logging can make moist or wet forests more fire prone [17]. Indeed, clear evidence of such inter-relationships can be found in tropical rainforests [7,8], wet temperate forests in western North America [9], and wet temperate forests in Australia [18••, 19, 20], although some moist forests may be an exception to this general response [21].…”

Section: Logging and Fire Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Logging may alter landscape structure not only as a result of cutting patterns but also indirectly through interactions with other kinds of disturbances such as fire regimes [7][8][9]. In this report, I provide some perspectives on relationships between forest landscape structure and natural resource management, with a particular focus on the effects of logging in wet forests where fire regimes (sensu [10,11]) are typically rare, highseverity stand-replacing conflagrations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactions between Forest Resource Management and Landscape Structure

Lindenmayer

2016

Curr Landscape Ecol Rep

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Logging of natural forests can directly alter landscape structure, defined here as the spatial pattern of patches of overstory forest cover of different ages. Logging can also alter landscape structure through interactions with other disturbances such as wildfire. Here, I briefly outline interactions between logging of wet forests, altered fire dynamics and landscape structure, with particular emphasis on the wet ash eucalypt forests of south-eastern Australia. There is compelling evidence for increased fire proneness of logged and regenerated wet forest stands around the world. There is also evidence of accumulated effects on fire dynamics, so-called Blandscape traps^that are associated with multiple, spatially dispersed cutblocks in wood production landscapes. That is, changes in stand-level flammability may accumulate over larger areas, thereby influencing patterns of spatial contagion in fire behavior. The impacts of altered patterns of landscape structure on biodiversity and ecosystem processes are often poorly understood. New science is required to better understand, quantify, and predict biotic responses to the new landscape dynamics and the spatial and temporal patterns of forest cover now occurring in many landscapes. Altered patterns of landscape structure have the potential to trigger ecosystem collapse in some forested environments. However, predicting ecosystem collapse is difficult and may even be impossible from a practical perspective. Managers and researchers need to become better informed about the risks of negative effects of combinations of ecosystem stressors that lead to novel spatial patterns in landscape structure and may make forest ecosystems more prone to landscape traps, regime shifts, and ecosystem collapse.

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Synergisms among Fire, Land Use, and Climate Change in the Amazon

Cited by 213 publications

References 69 publications

Modeling the radiative effects of biomass burning aerosols on carbon fluxes in the Amazon region

Modeling the radiative effects of biomass burning aerosols on carbon fluxes in the Amazon region

Deforestation: Carving up the Amazon

Interactions between Forest Resource Management and Landscape Structure

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