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Regions of China, India, Brazil, and southern Africa also showed increases in burned area. The impact of a warming and drying climate is more obvious at higher latitudes, where fire has increased in Canada and the American West. The changes in savanna, grassland, and tropical forest fire patterns are so large that they have so far offset some of the increased risk of fire caused by global warming, said Doug Morton, a forest scientist at NASA Goddard and a co-author of the study. As more people move into these areas and increase the investments in agriculture, they set fewer fires and the burned area declines again. Fire rarely occurs naturally in these forests but as humans settle an area, they often use fire to clear land for cropland and pastures.
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The way of doing agriculture changes, the practices change, and fire disappears from the grassland landscape.”Ī slightly different pattern occurs in tropical forests and other humid regions near the equator. “As soon as people invest in houses, crops, and livestock, they don’t want these fires close by anymore. “When land use intensifies on savannas, fire is used less and less as a tool,” Andela said. This leads the burned area to decline even more.īy 2015, savanna fires in Africa had declined by 700,000 square kilometers (270,000 square miles)-an area the size of Texas. As this economic development continues, the landscape becomes more fragmented and communities then enact legislation to control fires. But as many of these communities have shifted to cultivating permanent fields and building more houses, roads, and villages, the use of fire has declined. In traditional savanna cultures, people often set fires to keep grazing lands productive and free of shrubs and trees. They then compared these data sets with regional and global trends in agriculture and socio-economic development.Īcross Africa, fires collectively burned an area about half the size of the continental United States every year. The research team, led by Niels Andela of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, analyzed fire data derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. The line plot shows the annual fluctuations in global burned area and the overall downward trend.
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Blues represent areas where the trend was toward less burning, whether natural or human-caused, while red areas had more burning. The map above, based on data from the international research team, shows annual trends in burned area over the study period. Scientists determined that the decline in burned area was greatest in savannas and grasslands, where fires are essential for maintaining healthy ecosystems and habitat conservation. Globally, the total acreage burned by fires declined 24 percent between 19, according to a new paper published in Science. Using NASA satellites to detect fires and burn scars from space, researchers have found that an ongoing transition from nomadic cultures to settled lifestyles and intensifying agriculture has led to a steep drop in the use of fire for land clearing and an overall drop in natural and human-caused fires worldwide. Across the grasslands of Asia, the tropical forests of South America, and the savannas of Africa, shifting livelihoods are leading to a significant decline in burned area.