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 ecosys- tems. Combining leaf production, litterfall and climate observations from satellite and ground data in the Amazon forest, we show that seasonal variation in leaf prod...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The AnisoVeg product consists of monthly 1 km composites of anisotropy (ANI) and nadir-normalized (NAD) surface reflectance layers obtained from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor over the entire South American continent. The satellite data were preprocessed using the multi-angle implementation atmospheric correction (...

Studies showed that Brazilian Amazon indigenous territories (Its) are efficient models for preserving forests by reducing deforestation, fires, and related carbon emissions. Here, we used official remote sensing datasets to analyze deforestation inside and outside indigenous territories within Brazil's Amazon biome in the 2013-2021 period. We found...

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...

Land management and deforestation in tropical regions cause wildfires and forest degradation, leading to a loss of ecosystem services and global climate regulation. The objective of the study was to provide a comprehensive assessment of the spatial extent and patterns of burned areas in a new deforestation frontier in the Amazonas state. The method...

Forest degradation caused by logging and fire disturbances affect large areas of tropical forests every year. However, their true extent is not quantified, because conventional monitoring systems do not accurately map these disturbances or provide correct attributions. Having a monitoring system that can map areas and attributions of forest disturb...

A view-only version of the paper is available at the link: https://rdcu.be/cZT77

In the Amazon, deforestation and climate change lead to increased vulnerability to forest degradation, threatening its existing carbon stocks and its capacity as a carbon sink. We use satellite L‐Band Vegetation Optical Depth (L‐VOD) data that provide an integrated (top‐down) estimate of biomass carbon to track changes over 2011–2019. Because the s...

The Amazon has the largest remnant of tropical forests in the world and is being threatened daily by deforestation and forest degradation. The estimated area of forest degradation is underestimated, which is problematic for both sustainable policy enforcement, environmental oversight and national carbon emission inventories. Therefore, a deep learn...

The Global Stocktake (GST), implemented by the Paris Agreement, requires rapid developments in the capabilities to quantify annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals consistently from the global to the national scale and improvements to national GHG inventories. In particular, new capabilities are needed for accurate attribution of sources...

Canopy gaps are openings in the forest canopy resulting from branch fall and tree mortality events. The geographical distribution of large canopy gaps may reflect underlying variation in mortality and growth processes. However, a lack of data at the appropriate scale has limited our ability to study this relationship until now. We detected canopy g...

The detection of pre-Colombian geoglyphs, geometric structures outlined by trenches or walls, from airborne LiDAR data is usually made by visual observation of the variation in elevation and commonly using additional hillshading. Depending on the area covered by LiDAR to inspect and the variation in elevation, this method can be time consuming and...

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...

The productivity of rainforests growing on highly weathered tropical soils is expected to be limited by phosphorus availability¹. Yet, controlled fertilization experiments have been unable to demonstrate a dominant role for phosphorus in controlling tropical forest net primary productivity. Recent syntheses have demonstrated that responses to nitro...

The AnisoVeg product consists of monthly 1-km composites of anisotropy (ANI) and nadir-normalized (NAD) surface reflectance layers obtained from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor over the entire South America. The satellite data were pre-processed using the Multi-Angle Implementation Atmospheric Correction (MAIAC). Th...

Aim The aim was to evaluate fire activity for the entire Amazon and Amazon regions within each country/department from 2003 to 2020, assessing the potential contributions of drought and deforestation and contrasting 2020 with the previous years. Location Amazonia sensu lato . Time period Annually from 2003 to 2020. Major taxa studied Terrestrial...

Abstract The Amazon region in Brazil contains c. 5% of the palm species of the world. However, palm cover at macroecological scales has not yet been quantified in this biome. Here, we used high spatial resolution LiDAR data, acquired from 610 flightlines over the Brazilian Amazon, to map canopy palm cover for the first time using a deep learning ap...

Human activities pose a major threat to tropical forest biodiversity and ecosystem services. Although the impacts of deforestation are well studied, multiple land-use and land-cover transitions (LULCTs) occur in tropical landscapes, and we do not know how LULCTs differ in their rates or impacts on key ecosystem components. Here, we quantified the i...

Aim Our aim was to quantify the influence of climate and land use on major fires that occurred during the 2020 drought over the Brazilian Pantanal region. Location Alto Paraguay Basin, central‐western flank of Brazil. Time period 2003–2020. Methods We calculated climatic and burned area anomalies and Spearman's correlation between precipitation...

MATOPIBA is an agricultural frontier, where fires are essential for its biodiversity maintenance. However, the increase in its recurrence and intensity, as well as accidental fires can lead to socioeconomic and environmental losses. Due to this dual relationship with fire, near real-time (NRT) fire management is required throughout the region. In t...

While Brazil publicly committed to reduce deforestation in Amazonia at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), the Brazilian parliament is moving toward weakening environmental laws. Deforestation rates continue ascending, reaching in 2021 the highest value since 2006 (13,235 km2). To overcome this paradox, strategies to curb deforestation are...

Tropical forests provide essential environmental services to human well-being. In the world, Brazil has the largest continuous area of these forests. However, in the state of Maranhão, in the eastern Amazon, only 24% of the original forest cover remains. We integrated and analyzed active fires, burned area, land use and land cover, rainfall, and su...

The spectral variability of tropical forests during the Amazonian dry season is not entirely understood because of the divergent responses in Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) vegetation indices (VIs) measured under-increased water deficit and high insolation. Here, we used a dataset composed of 493 cloud-free PlanetScope (PS) i...

Aim Water availability is the major driver of tropical forest structure and dynamics. Most research has focused on the impacts of climatic water availability, whereas remarkably little is known about the influence of water table depth and excess soil water on forest processes. Nevertheless, given that plants take up water from the soil, the impacts...

The two major Brazilian biomes, the Amazonia and the Cerrado (savanna), are increasingly exposed to fires. The Amazonian Forest is a fire sensitive ecosystem where fires are a typically rare disturbance while the Cerrado is naturally fire-dependent. Human activities, such as landscape fragmentation and land-use management, have modified the fire re...

Several large-scale drivers of both anthropogenic and natural environmental changes are interacting nonlinearly in the transition zone between eastern Amazonia and the adjacent Cerrado, considered to be another Brazilian agricultural frontier. Land-use change for agrobusiness expansion together with climate change in the transition zone between eas...

Quantifying fuel load over large areas is essential to support integrated fire management initiatives in fire-prone regions to preserve carbon stock, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. It also allows a better understanding of global climate regulation as a potential carbon sink or source. Large area assessments usually require data from spaceb...

A deep learning model (U-Net) was trained to map forest degradation using Planet imagery (4.77 m resolution) in the Jamari National Forest at the Brazilian Amazon. Preliminary results showed an overall accuracy of 66%.

Fire is one of the main anthropogenic drivers that threatens the Amazon. Despite the clear link between rainfall and fire, the spatial and temporal relationship between these variables is still poorly understood in the Amazon. Here, we stratified the Amazon basin according to the dry season onset/end and investigated its relationship with the spati...

We report large-scale estimates of Amazonian gap dynamics using a novel approach with large datasets of airborne light detection and ranging (lidar), including five multi-temporal and 610 single-date lidar datasets. Specifically, we (1) compared the fixed height and relative height methods for gap delineation and established a relationship between...

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...

Deforestation, the complete removal of an area’s forest cover; and forest degradation, the significant loss of forest structure, functions, and processes; are the result of the interaction between various direct drivers, often operating in tandem. By 2018, the Amazon biome had lost approximately 870,000 km2 of its original forest cover, mainly due...