The 2020 Amazon fire season: challenges and opportunties from a new near-real time fire monitoring tool.

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The Amazon is the largest tropical forest on Earth and critical for climate regulation, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity conservation. Exceptional fire activity in 2019 sparked widespread concerns about Amazon forest conservation. Nevertheless, the inability to separate satellite fire detections by fire type hampered fire suppression efforts and rapid assessments of ecosystem and air quality impacts.

We have developed a new approach to fill this critical data gap on the relative contribution from different fire types to total Amazon fire activity using a new algorithm to track and classify individual fires in near-real time.

In September, 2020 surpassed 2019 to become the most active fire year in the southern Amazon since 2012, the year our time series start. Deforestation fires accounted for >40% of all fire detections in the southern Amazon in 2020, but there was a growing contribution from understory forest fires in the Brazilian states of Mato Gross and Pará towards the end of the burning season. I will use our new dataset discuss long-term trends in fire activity, highlight regional extremes during the 2020 fire season, and explore opportunities arising from our new approach to monitor and manage fires across the Amazon basin.  

Explore data at https://globalfiredata.org/pages/amazon-dashboard/