Fires in Brazil
Fires in Brazil
3 June 2009
Fires and Deforestation on the Amazon Frontier, Rondonia, Brazil
The state of Rondônia in western Brazil is one of the most deforested parts of the Amazon. By the beginning of this decade, the frontier had reached the remote northwest corner of Rondônia, pictured in this pair of images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASAs Terra satellite from 2007.
In the image from 12 August 2007, intact forest is deep green, while cleared areas are tan (bare ground) or light green (crops, pasture, or occasionally, second-growth forest). This image is one of ten images in the Earth ObservatorysWorld of Change: Amazon Deforestation article.
TERRA
12 August and 30 September 2007
The fishbone pattern of small clearings along new roads is the beginning of one of the common deforestation trajectories in the Amazon. New roads (legal and illegal) attract small farmers, who clear some land for crops. When the soil gives out, they convert the old croplands to pasture and clear new forest. When yields fall again and not enough forest remains to clear, they sell or abandon their small holdings to larger-scale ranchers, who consolidate the small farms into large pastures.
The image from 30 September 2007, shows one consequence of forest clearing in the Amazon: thick smoke that hangs over the forest at different times throughout the dry season. Fire is the primary tool for clearing land in the Amazon, and it doesnt always stay where land owners intend it to. It frequently escapes control and invades adjacent forest and pasture. In 2007, the biomass burning season in the Amazon wasthe most intense of this decade. This smoky sight was common throughout August and September.
The large image provided above is at MODIS maximum spatial resolution (level of detail) of 250 meters per pixel.
(source: earth observatory)
