Henrique Cassol

Bluebell Index

Natural regeneration of Amazon forests offers a promising strategy to mitigate forest loss and advance the goals of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. However, the vast variability in regeneration rates across environmental gradients and over time poses considerable challenges for assessing regeneration success and ecosystem services provision...

Tropical forests are increasingly threatened by deforestation and degradation, impacting carbon storage, climate regulations and biodiversity. Restoring these ecosystems is crucial for environmental sustainability, yet monitoring these efforts poses significant challenges. Secondary forests are in a constant state of flux, with growth depending on...

Full-waveform LiDAR (FWF) offers a promising advantage over other technologies to represent the vertical canopy structure of secondary successions in the Amazon region, as the waveform encapsulates the properties of all elements intercepting the emitted beam. In this study, we investigated modifications in the vertical structure of the Amazonian se...

Indigenous societies are known to have occupied the Amazon basin for more than 12,000 years, but the scale of their influence on Amazonian forests remains uncertain. We report the discovery, using LIDAR (light detection and ranging) information from across the basin, of 24 previously undetected pre-Columbian earthworks beneath the forest canopy. Mo...

Tropical forests such as the Amazonian rainforests play an important role for climate, are large carbon stores and are a treasure of biodiversity. Amazonian forests have been exposed to large-scale deforestation and degradation for many decades. Deforestation declined between 2005 and 2012 but more recently has again increased with similar rates as...

Amazon forests are the largest forests in the tropics and play a fundamental role for regional and global ecosystem service provision. However, they are under threat primarily from deforestation. Amazonia's carbon balance trend reflects the condition of its forests. There are different approaches to estimate large-scale carbon balances, including t...

The Amazon forest carbon sink is declining, mainly as a result of land-use and climate change1-4. Here we investigate how changes in law enforcement of environmental protection policies may have affected the Amazonian carbon balance between 2010 and 2018 compared with 2019 and 2020, based on atmospheric CO2 vertical profiles5,6, deforestation7 and...

This work aims to develop a new method to map Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) classes in the São Paulo State, Brazil, using Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) data. The novelty of the proposed method consists of selecting the images based on the spectral and temporal characteristics of the LULC classes. First, we defined the six classes to be m...

The globally important carbon sink of intact, old-growth tropical humid forests is declining because of climate change, deforestation and degradation from fire and logging1–3. Recovering tropical secondary and degraded forests now cover about 10% of the tropical forest area⁴, but how much carbon they accumulate remains uncertain. Here we quantify t...

Tropical forests such as the Amazonian rainforests play an important role for climate, are large carbon stores and are a treasure of biodiversity. Amazonian forests are being exposed to large scale deforestation and degradation for many decades which declined between 2005 and 2012 but more recently has again increased with similar rates as in the 2...

Este estudo busca identificar estádios fenológicos de plantios de Eucalipto por meio de ferramentas de Sensoriamento Remoto orbital. Este artigo utiliza como método proposto o Modelo Linear de Mistura Espectral para identificar ciclos fenológicos em plantios florestais de Eucalipto. Foram utilizados mosaicos mensais de imagens Landsat-8 (OLI) no pe...

RESUMO O projeto PRODES realiza o monitoramento do desmatamento por corte raso na Amazônia Legal desde 1988, disponibilizando inicialmente somente informações na forma de tabelas, sem os mapas da distribuição espacial como atualmente. Dessa maneira, o objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar um método para gerar a distribuição espacial das áreas mapead...

This article presents a method, based on orbital remote sensing, to map the extent of forest plantations in São Paulo State (Southeast Brazil). The proposed method uses the random forest machine learning algorithm available on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud computing platform. We used 30 m annual mosaics derived from Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper...

The Amazon Forest is a major locus for carbon and water cycling in the climate system whose function has been degraded in recent decades by land use and climate change. Most studies of Amazonia’s carbon balance have been limited by sparse sampling. We measured 742 atmospheric vertical profiles of CO2 and CO over four regions of Amazonia from 2010 t...

La degradación de los bosques amazónicos debe incorporarse a la agenda de la COP26 (traducción)

A degradação da floresta amazônica deve ser incorporada à agenda da COP26 (Tradução)

Atmospheric methane concentrations were nearly constant between 1999 and 2006, but have been rising since by an average of ~8 ppb per year. Increases in wetland emissions, the largest natural global methane source, may be partly responsible for this rise. The scarcity of in situ atmospheric methane observations in tropical regions may be one source...

With deforestation and associated fires ongoing at high rates, and amidst urgent need to preserve Amazonia, improving the understanding of biomass burning emissions drivers is essential. The use of orbital remote sensing data enables the estimate of both biomass burning emissions and deforestation. In this study, we have estimated emissions of part...

Free-to-read at: https://rdcu.be/cw7ua; Portuguese and Spanish versions of this paper are provided at: https://github.com/celsohlsj/ngeo_correspondence

Amazonia hosts the Earth’s largest tropical forests and has been shown to be an important carbon sink over recent decades1,2,3. This carbon sink seems to be in decline, however, as a result of factors such as deforestation and climate change1,2,3. Here we investigate Amazonia’s carbon budget and the main drivers responsible for its change into a ca...

Secondary forests (SFs) are one of the major carbons sinks in the Neotropics due to the rapid carbon assimilation in their above-ground biomass (AGB). However, the accurate contribution of SFs to the carbon cycle is a great challenge because of the uncertainty in AGB estimates. In this context, the main objective of this study is to explore full po...

While the climate and human-induced forest degradation is increasing in the Amazon, fire impacts on forest dynamics remain understudied in the wetter regions of the basin, which are susceptible to large wildfires only during extreme droughts. To address this gap, we installed burned and unburned plots immediately after a wildfire in the northern Pu...

Tropical secondary forests sequester carbon up to 20 times faster than old-growth forests. This rate does not capture spatial regrowth patterns due to environmental and disturbance drivers. Here we quantify the influence of such drivers on the rate and spatial patterns of regrowth in the Brazilian Amazon using satellite data. Carbon sequestration r...

The Amazon Basin is at the center of an intensifying discourse about deforestation, land-use, and global change. To date, climate research in the Basin has overwhelmingly focused on the cycling and storage of carbon (C) and its implications for global climate. Missing, however, is a more comprehensive consideration of other significant biophysical...

O Cerrado é o segundo maior bioma brasileiro, sendo reconhecido como a savana mais biodiversa do mundo. Após 1970, as dinâmicas de uso e cobertura da terra do bioma têm sido marcadas por atividades agropecuárias extensivas, resultando em taxas de desmatamento historicamente superiores às do bioma Amazônia. Esse cenário reforça a necessidade de inve...

Quantifying forest fires remain a challenging task for the implementation of public policies aimed to mitigate climate change. In this paper, we propose a new method to provide an annual burned area map of Mato Grosso State located in the Brazilian Amazon region, taking advantage of the high spatial and temporal resolution sensors. The method consi...

Aircraft atmospheric profiling is a valuable technique for determining greenhouse gas fluxes at regional scales (10 4-10 6 km 2). Here, we describe a new, simple method for estimating the surface influence of air samples that uses backward trajectories based on the Lagrangian model Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory Model (HYSP...

Secondary forests (SF) have a large climate mitigation potential, given their ability to sequester carbon up to 20 times faster than old-growth forests. Environmental variability and anthropogenic disturbances lead to uncertainties in estimating spatial patterns of SF carbon sequestration rates. Here we quantify the influence of environmental and d...

Brazil, with more than 8 million km2, presents six different biomes, ranging from natural grasslands (Pampa biome) to tropical rainfall forests (Amazônia biome), with different land use types (mostly pasturelands and croplands) and pressures (mainly in the Cerrado biome). The objective of this paper is to present a new method to discriminate the mo...

This paper presents a new approach for rapidly assessing the extent of land use and land cover (LULC) areas in Mato Grosso state, Brazil. The novel idea is the use of an annual time series of fraction images derived from the linear spectral mixing model (LSMM) instead of original bands. The LSMM was applied to the Project for On-Board Autonomy-Vege...

This paper presents a new method for rapid assessment of the extent of annual croplands in Brazil. The proposed method applies a linear spectral mixing model (LSMM) to PROBA-V time series images to derive vegetation, soil, and shade fraction images for regional analysis. We used S10-TOC (10 days synthesis, 1 km spatial resolution, and top-of-canopy...

Recent droughts have increased the magnitude and frequency of the forest fires in the Amazon (Aragão et al. 2018). As a consequence, the Amazon has become a Carbon source due to the rising of the Carbon emission from biomass burned in the El Niño events. Faced with climate change and the likely acceleration of temperature in tropical regions, we hy...

Secondary forests (SFs) are one of the major carbon sink in the Neotropics due to the rapid carbon assimilating in their aboveground biomass (AGB). However, the accurate contribution of the SFs to the carbon cycle is a great challenge because of the uncertainty in AGB estimates. In this context, the main objective of this work is to explore polarim...

Forest degradation by selective logging is considered one of the main causes of biodiversity loss and CO2 emissions in tropical regions. However, persistent cloud cover limits the detection of selective logging using optical satellite systems in the Brazilian Amazon. We develop a novel approach to detect selective logging using one-year time-series...

Secondary forests (SF) are important carbon sinks, removing CO2 from the atmosphere through the photosynthesis process and storing photosynthates in their aboveground live biomass (AGB). This process occurring at large-scales partially counteracts C emissions from land-use change, playing, hence, an important role in the global carbon cycle. The ab...

Secondary forests (SF) are important carbon sinks, removing CO2 from the atmosphere through the photosynthesis process and storing photosynthates in their aboveground live biomass (AGB). This process occurring at large-scales partially counteracts C emissions from land-use change, playing, hence, an important role in the global carbon cycle. The ab...

This paper presents a novel approach for estimating the height of individual trees in secondary forests at two study sites: Manaus (central Amazon) and Santarém (eastern Amazon) in the Brazilian Amazon region. The approach consists of adjusting tree height-diameter at breast height (H:DBH) models in each study site by ecological species groups: pio...

O estudo pretende estimar a redução de CO2 proporcionada pela produção de biocombustíveis a partir do óleo de dendê nas áreas aptas ao cultivo, segundo o ZAE-Dendê da Amazônia Brasileira. Essas estimativas, ainda escassas na literatura, são parte das diretrizes governamentais frente às mudanças climáticas. Tais diretrizes envolvem a mensuração de d...

http://dx.doi.org/10.5902/1980509813334The aim of this study was to simulate the gap areas formed after logging in a management gardeningsystem, using geoprocessing techniques. In a 5.6 ha of a seasonal semi deciduous forest located in LinhaCanudos, Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul state, 924 trees were georeferenced using a GPS receiver. In thesetre...

Resumo O trabalho teve como objetivo inventariar o carbono de um fragmento de Floresta Ombrófila Mista utilizando dados provenientes de sensores de média resolução espacial. Uma cena dos sensores ASTER, LISS e TM foi empregada na obtenção dos dados radiométricos (espectrais), e os dados de biomassa e carbono (biofísicos) foram oriundos de parcelas...

The aim of this study was to simulate the gap areas formed after logging in a management gardening system, using geoprocessing techniques. In a 5.6 ha of a seasonal semi deciduous forest located in Linha Canudos, Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul state, 924 trees were georeferenced using a GPS receiver. In these trees was determined the sustainable cu...

The research aims to make inventory of carbon of a fragment of Araucaria Forest using data from medium spatial resolution sensors. Satellite data from ASTER, TM and LISS were used to obtain the radiometric data. The above ground biomass and carbon data (biophysical data) were derived from the continuous forest inventory located in São João do Triun...