Quantifying forest fire emissions in Amazonia

Abstract

Across the tropics, Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) is a major source of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) emissions. Brazil, for example, is the world's 6th largest emitter of GHG, and ~40% of those emissions are derived from LULCC. Most of those emissions are from deforestation and degradation of humid tropical forests in the Amazon basin, which stores ~100 Pg of carbon in biomass and necromass. The assessments of CO2 emissions from these tropical forests are mainly based on annual satellite-based assessments of deforestation, which have been ongoing since the 80's. Currently, the annual estimates of CO2 emissions and removals from LULUCF in Brazil are estimated following IPCC guidelines and none of them include fire or other degradation emissions to estimate the carbon budget. Therefore, this Postdoctoral (PD) fellowship proposal is intended to support the RCGI Work Group 2 (WG2) project's activities led by Dr Aragão, entitled "Sources, sinks and processes controlling greenhouse gases emissions in Amazonia", part of the joint Shell-FAPESP research call. This PD fellowship will focus on the overarching objective from WG2, which aim to "Build up a model of forest fire emission and quantify its relative contribution to gross deforestation and other degradation processes", which represents the most up to date and complete regional evaluation of forest fire-related carbon emissions in the Amazon. The PD fellow will be responsible for systematically quantify annual carbon emissions from forests affected by fires combining field monitoring, time series of satellite images (WG1) and an unprecedented model of emissions from forest. This analysis requires a PD fellow with a strong quantitative background in geographical information system and remote sensing. (AU)