Fires and Grasslands of Latin America
| Analytical Overview |
| The European Space Agency has used Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) satellite imagery to map the location of fires. Although some fires are recognized as critical to the maintenance of grassland ecosystems, and serve as an important management tool, new fire datasets showing broad-scale fire distribution raise new questions. Are the frequency and extent of fires shown in these maps typical or has there been a recent increase? What are the short- and long-term effects of these fires on ecosystem services? Continued monitoring using satellite data as well as field studies should provide answers. |
Map Projection
Interrupted Goode's Homolosine
Map Description
This map shows the location of all fires detected during 1993 for Africa, Latin America, and Indo-Malaysia/Oceania. Fire on the African continent appears to be confined by the Sahara Desert to the north, by the Horn of Africa to the east, and by the Kalahari Desert to the south (Arino and Melinotte 1998). Tropical rainforest serves as a fire boundary with fires greatest in the grasslands on either side of the equator. A somewhat similar pattern is found in South America where the least number of fires occur in the Amazon Basin and southern Patagonia, and the greatest number occur in the grasslands of eastern Brazil and Venezuela.
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Citation:
World Resources Institute - PAGE, 2000
Sources:
- GLCCD, 1998. Loveland, T.R., B.C. Reed, J.F. Brown, D.O. Ohlen, Z. Zhu, L. Yang, and J. Merchant. 1998. "Development of a Global Land Cover Characteristics Database and IGBP DISCover from 1-km AVHRR Data" In International Journal of Remote Sensing21(6-7): 1303-1330.
Available On-line at: Source Link.Global Land Cover Characteristics Database, Version 1.2.. - Arino, O. and J.M. Melinotte. 1998. The 1993 Africa Fire Map.International Journal of Remote Sensing19(11):