AFIRE - Assessing ENSO-induced Fire Impacts in tropical Rainforest Ecosystems

Tropical forests store more than a half of the world's forest carbon and produce over one third of the productivity of all terrestrial systems. They are also biodiversity hotspots, and host a large proportion of the world's terrestrial flora and fauna. However, growing evidence shows that the ability of tropical forests to perform important ecosystem services (i.e. carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation) has been dramatically reduced by multiple pressures associated with human-induced forest disturbances (e.g. agriculture, logging, fire and fragmentation) and extreme climate events. Of these disturbances, fire represents of the greatest threats. Rainforests have not co-evolved with fire, and species have not adapted to withstand fire or the changes it imposes on the forests. Yet today, ignition sources are common in most human-modified regions, as many local farmers living within tropical forests traditionally use fire as a management technique to prepare their land for planting. This is compounded by selective logging and fragmentation, which increase the flammability of the remaining forests. Critically, fires are much more likely to escape their target area and enter the surrounding forests during severe drought events.

This is exactly what happened during the current 2015-16 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) - considered one of the three strongest events ever recorded. The prolonged dry season allowed thousands of fires to get out of control in Amazonian and SE Asian tropical rainforests. Specifically in the Brazilian Amazon, the end of 2015 was marked by over 87,000 fire events, a 48% increase in relation to 2014 (a non-ENSO year). As a result, the widespread wildfires affected half of our 20 permanent plots near the Santarém region in the state of Pará, while fortunately preserving the other ten plots unburned. The Sustainable Amazon Network (SAN) has established these plots along a gradient of forest modification in 2010, and since 2014 a joint project between UK and Brazilian scientists (ECOFOR) has been carrying out research in this region. Consequently, the work we are proposing here benefits from unique and detailed pre-fire information on carbon dynamics and plant functional traits (from ECOFOR) as well as the distribution of three distinct taxa (birds, dung beetles and plants) and secondary seed dispersal processes (from SAN). Uniquely our network of permanent plots is established along an existing gradient of forest modification before the 2015 fires, allowing us to undertake the first rigorous evaluation of fire effects across different forest disturbance classes.

This ability to examine fire impacts using detailed pre-fire data allows us to develop three major avenues of research across a human-modified gradient of forest disturbances: (1) the impacts of very severe wildfires on plant communities and carbon dynamics, assessing therefore which plant functional traits may predict species mortality, survival and recruitment; (2) an investigation into the fire impacts on forest fauna (i.e. birds and dung beetles) and associated seed dispersal processes; and (3) the development of a detailed understanding of scale and impacts of the current extreme ENSO-event, exploring the relationship between remote sensing information and ground-based measures. The better linkages between remote-sensing products and actual measures of fire severity will allow us to scale up the carbon emission and biodiversity loss estimates across the whole region.

The results fo AFIRE are critically important, as tropical forests around the world may be threatened by drier, hotter and longer dry seasons with climate change. Our findings will help inform mitigation strategies to manage the impacts of future ENSO-mediated droughts and severe wildfires on tropical forests. We also expect AFIRE plots to form the basis of much longer-term research on the impacts of tropical wildfire

AFIRE aims to impact three distinct non-academic audiences: (i) Amazonian stakeholders and decision-makers; (ii) Amazonian schools and communities, and (iii) The general public (especially in Brazil, other tropical forest nations, and the UK).

(i) Through the AFIRE stakeholder meeting at the end of the project, we expect to contribute to the discussion and development of effective fire management strategies to be applied by the Amazonian stakeholders and decision-makers. These has potential to benefit the national and regional environmental agencies (IBAMA and SEMA, respectively), and local park managers (FLONA Tapajós) in Brazil, which could apply these strategies for improving the forest management plan of Brazilian protected areas. As result, we also expect that effective fire management-policies will benefit the regional farmers union (represented by SIRSAN), as well as the local logging concession (COMFLONA), by reducing the chances of further wildfire occurrence on farmers' plantations and high-timber forests, respectively. Through inviting companies and NGOs which are implementing REDD+ projects in the region to our stakeholder meeting, we also hope to furthering discuss the importance of considering forest fires in the REDD+ policies.

(ii) We will ensure that AFIRE distributes its main results in the form of booklets, using accessible language (and translated to Portuguese). We will focus our efforts on schools and communities in the Santarém region, building on already established contacts with community leaders and school directors in the region. In doing so, we intend to increase the awareness of local people about the fire impacts on forest structure, biodiversity and ecosystem processes. We will also produce species lists of all the three sampled taxa to be shared with the landowners of our 20 permanent plots, which include many smallholders and the ICMBio (local park manager of Tapajós National Forest). We expect this dissemination exercise to be carried out by the PDRA, who will benefit by to improving his/her communication skills in non-academic environments.

(iii) The general public (especially in Brazil, other tropical forest nations, and the UK) will be benefited through an increased understanding of the impacts of ENSO-mediated droughts and consequent wildfires on tropical forest structure, biodiversity and ecosystem processes. To achieve this, we will build on our previous experience in scientific communication for both academic and non-academic communities via blogposts, websites and educational videos. In particular, we have recently achieved a great level of public attention when disseminating our research through the UK and Brazilian media. We achieved half of million readers when The Daily Express re-published our blogpost about the El Niño fires in the Amazon, previously published in The Conservation blog; and up to four million readers in Brazil, when O Globo, the largest Brazilian newspaper, published two articles about the impacts of ENSO fires in the Amazon forest. Informing the general public will increase their involvement with environmental issues related to tropical forests. As public opinion has clear potential to influence policy-makers, we expect further positive effects on the development of wildfire mitigation policies, specifically in Brazil and other tropical forest nations.