Luiz E. O. C. Aragão

National Institute for Space Research, Brazil | inpe · Remote Sensing Division

Tropical carbon emissions are largely derived from direct forest clearing processes. Yet, emissions from drought-induced forest fires are, usually, not included in national-level carbon emission inventories. Here we examine Brazilian Amazon drought impacts on fire incidence and associated forest fire carbon emissions over the period 2003–2015. We s...

Understanding forest loss patterns in Amazonia, the Earth's largest rainforest region, is critical for effective forest conservation and management. Following the most detailed analysis to date, spanning the entire Amazon and extending over a 14-year period (2001-2014), we reveal significant shifts in deforestation dynamics of Amazonian forests. Fi...

The discovery of large geometrical earthworks in interfluvial settings of southern Amazonia has challenged the idea that Pre-Columbian populations were concentrated along the major floodplains. However, a spatial gap in the archaeological record of the Amazon has limited the assessment of the territorial extent of earth-builders. Here, we report th...

Our limited understanding of the climate controls on tropical forest seasonality is one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in modeling climate change impacts on terrestrial ecosystems. Combining leaf production, litterfall and climate observations from satellite and ground data in the Amazon forest, we show that seasonal variation in leaf produc...

Amazonia is home to more than half of the world’s remaining tropical forests, playing a key role as reservoirs of carbon and biodiversity. However, whether at a slower or faster pace, continued deforestation causes forest fragmentation in this region. Thus, understanding the relationship between forest fragmentation and fire incidence and intensity...

Forest degradation and forest disturbance are distinct yet often conflated concepts, complicating their definition and monitoring. Forest degradation involves interrupted succession and a severe reduction in forest services over time, caused by factors like fires, illegal selective logging, and edge effects. Forest disturbance, on the other hand, r...

Amazon forests are becoming increasingly vulnerable to disturbances such as droughts, fires, windstorms, logging, and forest fragmentation, all of which lead to forest degradation. Nevertheless, quantifying the extent and severity of disturbances and their cumulative impact on forest degradation remains a significant challenge. In this study, we co...

Understanding the limits between fire as an ecologic component and vegetation degradation is crucial for the management of natural areas. This study proposes a spatial analysis to identify patterns between fire recurrence and non-fire intervals, evaluating the change in biomass stock in two types of savannah in Maranhão: forested and wooded. Firstl...

The Amazon rainforest plays a crucial role in climate regulation, being responsible for a significant role in the carbon cycle on a global scale. However, deforestation and fires are determining vectors for forest degradation in the ecosystem, resulting in the loss of biodiversity and increased greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, this study aimed to ev...

Integrating Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) and Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) enhances the assessment of tropical forest degradation and regeneration, which is crucial for conservation and climate mitigation strategies. This study optimized procedures using combined airborne LiDAR, HSI data, and machine learning algorithms across 12 sites in the...

A regeneração natural das florestas tem ganhado destaque nos últimos anos como uma estratégia para a restauração ecológica de ecossistemas florestais, para a mitigação das mudanças climáticas e para o licenciamento e a adequação ambiental à legislação brasileira. Com isso, uma diversidade de termos técnicos tem sido empregada nos contextos legais...

Managing fuels is a key strategy for mitigating the negative impacts of wildfires on people and the environment. The use of satellite‐based Earth observation data has become an important tool for managers to optimize fuel treatment planning at regional scales. Fortunately, several new sensors have been launched in the last few years, providing nove...

Brazil, a crucial player in global climate change mitigation, faces challenges in reducing its carbon emissions, of which nearly half are from land use changes. Despite potential reductions that can be achieved through halting deforestation and fostering forest restoration, setbacks in environmental governance have heightened emissions. This articl...

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...

The Amazon Rainforest, crucial for climate regulation, carbon and water cycles, and biodiversity preservation, faces escalating threats from heightened forest degradation, including disturbances from fire and logging. In 2020, Brazil was responsible for a concerning 70% of the active fire hotspots detected in the Amazon, signaling a notable 60% inc...

Biomass burning (BB) plays a key role in the biosphere-atmosphere interaction. It is a major source of trace gases and aerosols that alters the atmosphere and the water cycle. Additionally, these emissions are often related to other detrimental impacts including biodiversity loss in fire-sensitive biomes, increase of respiratory diseases, and massi...

Anthropogenic disturbances stand as the primary driver of degradation in the remaining Amazon forests, posing a significant threat to their future. Notable among these disturbances are edge effects, timber extraction, fire, extreme droughts and temperatures, which have been intensified by human-induced climate change. A pilot study aiming to integr...

The Brazilian Atlantic Forest (AF) covers 13% of Brazil but retains only 26% of its original forest area. Utilizing a Morphological Spatial Pattern Analysis (MSPA), we generated 30-m spatial resolution fragmentation maps for old-growth and secondary forests across the AF. We quantified landscape fragmentation patterns and carbon (C) dynamics over 3...

In 2023, Brazil achieved positive environmental strides in the Amazon, with a 22% reduction in deforestation rates and a 16% decline in total fire counts compared with 2022, attributed to renewed environmental policy implementation. However, despite progress, deforestation remains above the target, and forest wildfires in old‐growth Amazonian fores...

Severe droughts increase the forest flammability, especially if fires are recurrent. Considering that fires tend to alter the forest structure and reduce biological diversity, we analyzed the fire effect on the tree plant community and forest structure over a 10-year post-fire period. The study was carried out in two tropical forest fragments locat...

The Amazon is the largest continuous tropical forest in the world and plays a key role in the global carbon cycle. Human-induced disturbances and climate change have impacted the Amazon carbon balance. Here we conduct a comprehensive synthesis of existing state-of-the-art estimates of the contemporary land carbon fluxes in the Amazon using a set of...

Airborne LiDAR data represents one of the most accurate ways to estimate forest structure and carbon nowadays. This study aimed to estimate the intensity of selective logging activities in terms of density and volume of logged trees based on airborne LiDAR data in comparison to ground measurements on a forest concession area in the Brazilian Amazon...

O estudo destaca a importância crítica da vegetação na Amazônia para a estabilidade climática, mas ressalta os impactos severos do desmatamento, especialmente nas atividades agrícolas, queimadas e infraestrutura. A região sudoeste da Amazônia enfrenta uma vulnerabilidade significativa à perda de serviços ecossistêmicos. Modelos espacialmente explíc...

Fires affect the Amazon rainforest and cause various socio-environmental problems. Analyses of forest fire dynamics supporting actions to combat and prevent forest fires. However, many studies have reported discrepancies in the quantification of fire, especially in the tropics. We evaluated four operational products for estimating burned areas (MAP...

Background The application of different approaches calculating the anthropogenic carbon net flux from land, leads to estimates that vary considerably. One reason for these variations is the extent to which approaches consider forest land to be “managed” by humans, and thus contributing to the net anthropogenic flux. Global Earth Observation (EO) da...

Biomass burning (BB) emissions negatively impact the biosphere and human lives. Orbital remote sensing and modelling are used to estimate BB emissions on regional to global scales, but these estimates are subject to errors related to the parameters, data, and methods available. For example, emission factors (mass emitted by species during BB per ma...

In this paper, we extend and combine the work of two previously published studies identifying secondary forest age (Silva et al., 2020) and their associated aboveground carbon recovery rates (Heinrich et al., 2021), publishing the full and updated temporal record of these datasets in a user-friendly toolkit called “RE:Growth” (https://ee-regrowth.p...

Projeto construído em parceria de instituições para desenvolver tecnologias inovadoras para monitoramento do uso da água, em escala nacional, baseadas em dados meteorológicos, hidrológicos e de satélite. Entre os objetivos, buscou-se aprimorar estimativas de evapotranspiração (ET), em escala local e regional, utilizando-se modelos com base no balan...

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...

A iniciativa Diálogos entre Saberes por uma Amazônia que Queremos oferece uma oportunidade única de disseminar as mensagens principais do Relatório para um público mais amplo através de uma linguagem mais acessível. Nesta iniciativa, SPA & Bori e a Nexo Políticas Públicas uniram suas habilidades em ciência e comunicação para amplificar a ciência so...

Tropical rainforests from the Brazilian Amazon are frequently degraded by logging, fire, edge effects and minor unpaved roads. However, mapping the extent of degradation remains challenging because of the lack of frequent high-spatial resolution satellite observations, occlusion of understory disturbances, quick recovery of leafy vegetation, and li...

The tropical forest carbon sink is known to be drought sensitive, but it is unclear which forests are the most vulnerable to extreme events. Forests with hotter and drier baseline conditions may be protected by prior adaptation, or more vulnerable because they operate closer to physiological limits. Here we report that forests in drier South Americ...

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...

Graphical abstract Highlights d Ecological metadata were compiled for 7,694 sites across the Brazilian Amazon d Accessibility and proximity to research facilities influenced research probability d Knowledge gaps are greater in uplands than in wetlands and aquatic habitats d Undersampled areas overlap predicted hotspots of climate change and defores...

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time, and attempts to address it require a clear understanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space. While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environme...

Record-breaking wildfires over 40,000 km2 (affecting 30% percent of the biome) in 2020 reached the Pantanal, a vast and well-preserved tropical wetland, shared between Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. While fires have been occurring in the Pantanal for millennia, their area has increased by 376% since 2000 compared to the annual average of the area b...

For more than three decades, major efforts in sampling and analyzing tree diversity in South America have focused almost exclusively on trees with stems of at least 10 and 2.5 cm diameter, showing highest species diversity in the wetter western and northern Amazon forests. By contrast, little attention has been paid to patterns and drivers of diver...

Citation: Costa, J.G.; Fearnside, P.M.; Oliveira, I.; Anderson, L.O.; de Aragão, L.E.O.e.C.; Almeida, M.R.N.; Clemente, F.S.; Nascimento, E.d.S.; Souza, G.d.C.; Karlokoski, A.; et al. Abstract: Amazonian biodiversity has been used for generations by human populations, especially by Indigenous peoples and traditional communities in their cultural, s...

Esta nota apresenta uma nova metodologia, baseada em produtos geoespaciais, derivados de imagens de satélite e integrados por meio de inteligência artificial, para priorizar as áreas para o combate ao desmatamento na Amazônia, com antecedência de meses antes do evento. Na presente nota técnica, objetivamos (1) avaliar a concordância do mapa contend...

Tropical forests face increasing climate risk1,2, yet our ability to predict their response to climate change is limited by poor understanding of their resistance to water stress. Although xylem embolism resistance thresholds (for example, [Formula: see text]50) and hydraulic safety margins (for example, HSM50) are important predictors of drought-i...

RESUMO O Estado do Pará possui um grande potencial de remoção de gases de efeito estufa da atmosfera pelo crescimento de florestas secundárias, o que pode estar sendo comprometido pelos incêndios florestais-fonte de emissão ainda não contabilizadas nos inventários nacionais. Diante disso, nós utilizamos dados do MapBiomas e do SEEG para calcular o...

Studies showed that Brazilian Amazon indigenous territories (ITs) are efficient models for preserving forests by reducing deforestation, fires, and related carbon emissions. Considering the importance of ITs for conserving socio-environmental and cultural diversity and the recent climb in the Brazilian Amazon deforestation, we used official remote...

RESUMO As mudanças do uso e ocupação da terra proporcionam diversas alterações na paisagem. A fragmentação florestal, que induz o crescimento das bordas e a perda da cobertura florestal, tem servido como um fator para o avanço das áreas queimadas no sudoeste da Amazônia. O objetivo desse trabalho foi analisar o papel da fragmentação florestal na oc...

RESUMO Boca do Acre constitui uma nova fronteira de expansão madeireira, ocupando o quarto lugar no estado do Amazonas áreas de exploradas. O objetivo deste estudo foi analisar a evolução da atividade madeireira e do desmatamento no período de 2007 a 2019 em Boca do Acre. Para isso, utilizamos a imagem-fração solo obtida pelo Modelo Linear de Mistu...

Tropical forests provide essential ecosystem services, including carbon storage, biodiversity, and climate regulation. However, deforestation and forest degradation compromise the ability of forests to provide ecosystem services, including the loss of carbon stocks that go into the atmosphere. Here we test the hypothesis that the edge effect and fo...

Brazil contains some of the most fire-prone regions in the world, and this motivates the development of a fire probability forecast system. CEMADEN has collaborations with the states of Acre (AC), Goiás (GO), Maranhão (MA) and Mato Grosso do Sul (MS), which use the CEMADEN fire probability forecast data to guide prevention and mitigation actions. I...

Fires are among the main drivers of forest degradation in Amazonia, causing multiple socioeconomic and environmental damages. Although human-ignited sources account for most of the fire events in Amazonia, extended droughts may magnify their occurrence and propagation. The southwestern Amazonia, a transnational region shared by Brazil, Peru, and Bo...

Background Plot-based monitoring has yielded much information on the taxonomic diversity and carbon (C) storage in tropical lowland forests of the Amazon basin. This has resulted in an improved understanding of the relationship between lowland forest biomass dynamics and global change drivers, such as climate change and atmospheric CO2 concentratio...

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...

Fragmented tropical forest landscapes preserve much of the remaining biodiversity and carbon stocks. Climate change is expected to intensify droughts and increase fire hazard and fire intensities, thereby causing habitat deterioration, and losses of biodiversity and carbon stock losses. Understanding the trajectories that these landscapes may follo...

The Amazon is the largest continuous tropical forest in the world and plays a key role in the global carbon cycle. Human-induced disturbances and climate change have impacted the Amazon carbon balance. Here we conduct a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art estimates of the contemporary land carbon fluxes in the Amazon. Over the whole Amazon r...

Careful management of deforested Amazonian land cannot replace, but must complement, efforts to preserve the rainforest. Sustainable agricultural practices that promote diverse uses can help minimise climate and environmental impacts. Different land uses in deforested regions of Amazonia can have very different impacts on the climate and environme...

Background Different methods estimating the global anthropogenic land flux, which is dominated by forest-related activities, vary in magnitude and direction with respect to whether the land is a net source or sink. One reason for these variations is the extent to which methods consider land to be “managed”, thus contributing to the anthropogenic fl...

Amazon forests are being degraded by myriad anthropogenic disturbances, altering ecosystem and climate function. We analyzed the effects of a range of land‐use and climate‐change disturbances on fine‐scale canopy structure using a large database of profiling canopy lidar collected from disturbed and mature Amazon forest plots. At most of the distur...

Drought and fire reduce productivity and increase tree mortality in tropical forests. Fires also produce pyrogenic carbon (PyC), which persists in situ for centuries to millennia, and represents a legacy of past fires, potentially improving soil fertility and water holding capacity and selecting for the survival and recruitment of certain tree life...

Approximately 2.5 × 106 square kilometers of the Amazon forest are currently degraded by fire, edge effects, timber extraction, and/or extreme drought, representing 38% of all remaining forests in the region. Carbon emissions from this degradation total up to 0.2 petagrams of carbon per year (Pg C year-1), which is equivalent to, if not greater tha...