New system can predict fire in Cerrado in real time – 07/12/2023 – Environment

The Cerrado is the most biodiverse savannah in the world and is home to 33% of all Brazilian biodiversity. However, impacted by the expansion of agriculture and livestock, it is now strongly threatened.

Alongside an effective preservation policy, a crucial issue to be resolved is fire management. The Brazilian Cerrado is the biome most affected by forest fires in all of South America. And these events are getting worse globally due to climate change, as evidenced by the June disaster in Canada.

An online system capable of predicting the spread of fires was developed at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), in partnership with researchers from the University of Brasília (UnB), the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) and the National Institute of Space Research (Inpe). An article about it was published in the magazine Scientific reports.

“The system is the only one in the world capable of predicting the spread of fires in almost real time. It uses remote sensing images together with climate and relief data to simulate the spread of fire throughout the biome and has an accuracy rate that reaches to 89%. The spatial resolution is 25 hectares for most of the biome and 0.04 hectares, much more refined, for nine Conservation Units [UCs]”, says the first author of the article, Ubirajara Oliveira, professor in the postgraduate course in Analysis and Modeling of Environmental Systems at UFMG, where he also works as a researcher at the Center for Remote Sensing.

Oliveira informs that, with this new resource, the spread of fire is simulated three times a day throughout the Cerrado. “For this, the system automatically loads data that makes it possible to know the sources of ignition, the abundance of combustible material, the humidity of the vegetation and the probability of burning. Until now, no global or regional initiative offered a set of similar solutions, mainly in the regarding the fully automated prediction of propagation in practically real time and the high resolution of the satellite images”, he says.

Given a given source of ignition, the system is able to predict the direction of fire propagation, the duration of burning, the total area that can be burned, the consumption of biomass and the resulting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The model incorporates climatic conditions and the effect of a range of anthropogenic factors, such as land zoning and proximity to highways and urban areas.

Fire in the right measure

Like the other savannas in the world, the Cerrado evolved in the presence of fire. And your plants have adapted to it. Rustic trees are often coated with thick plant tissue, made up of dead cells, which surrounds the trunks and branches. When the area burns, this suber (tissue formed by several layers of dead cells and impregnated with suberin, a substance of lipid origin) acts as a thermal insulator, protecting the internal living tissues. The suber burns, but the tree survives and a new suber is formed. As for the herbaceous layer, formed by grasses and herbs, and small plants, the great resilience factor is the roots and underground reserve organs. These store the buds, which promote regrowth after the area catches fire.

Used in a preventive, intelligent and judicious way, with zoning of the total area and burning schedule, in a rotating system, fire is indispensable for the preservation and renewal of the Cerrado.

Very different, however, is the indiscriminate and often criminal use of fire, with a view to eliminating native plants and preparing the land for extensive agriculture and livestock. Or the uncontrolled fires, fueled by the accumulation of combustible material after several years without burning and which spread in a disastrous way, compromising the regeneration capacity of vegetation and the survival of animals, which are trapped in the middle of the flames, with no escape area.

To avoid such occurrences, the fire propagation prediction system was developed. “It points to a way to optimize prevention and firefighting. The platform is already being used in the daily operations of selected Conservation Units”, emphasizes Oliveira.

But the use of the prevention system is not restricted to these units. And it is available to anyone with internet access through this website. The easy-to-use platform allows the public, even without technical knowledge, to visualize and interpret the results through interactive maps and graphics.

“All this was only possible thanks to the Dinamica EGO software, also developed at the UFMG Remote Sensing Center, which allows the efficient processing of a huge amount of data”, points out the researcher.

The platform, which is part of the Systems for Preventing Forest Fires and Monitoring Vegetal Coverage in the Brazilian Cerrado, was named FISC-Cerrado, the term FISC being the result of the English expression “fire, ignition, spread and carbon cycling” (fire, ignition, propagation and carbon cycling).

FISC-Cerrado was developed under the FIP Program (Forest Investment Program), a global initiative that brings together resources from different donors, managed by the World Bank, with the purpose of reducing deforestation and forest degradation and promoting the sustainable management of forests. . Given the enormous importance and vulnerability of the Cerrado, the program chose this biome for its activities in Brazil.

It is worth remembering that the Cerrado, the second largest biome in the country, is home to more than 11 million species of plants, more than 2,500 species of animals and the sources of the three largest river basins in South America. Its surface, of 2 million square kilometers, extends over 11 states: Maranhão, Piauí, Bahia, Tocantins, Goiás, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Federal District, Minas Gerais, São Paulo and Paraná.

In addition to FIP support, the work in question received financial support from several institutions, including Fapesp, through the Thematic Project “Transition to sustainability and the water-agriculture-energy nexus: exploring an integrative approach with case studies in Cerrado and Caatinga biomes”, coordinated by researcher Jean Ometto, co-author of the study published in Scientific Reports.

The article A near real-time web-system for predicting fire spread across the Cerrado biome can be accessed at www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-30560-9.

A video explaining how the system works is available on YouTube. And the portal “Forest Fire Prevention Systems and Vegetation Coverage Monitoring in the Brazilian Cerrado” can be found here.