Large fires escaped from fields and pastures have become common dry season events ravaging forests, farms, and settlements in much of Amazonia. Such destructive fires have recently become a major problem along the upper Ucayali River in the lowland Peruvian Amazon where burning has been used for centuries to manage agricultural fields, and more recently, to clear and clean pastures. While still largely mosaics of small agricultural fields, diverse gardens and extensive mature forests, these landscapes are being rapidly transformed by clearing for large-scale plantation agriculture (especially biofuel production), by extensive ranching, and by new smaller-scale land uses. This project will investigate processes of change in land use, migration, urbanization, and climate and their links to the probability of changes in the incidence, size and severity of escaped fires using the tools of the natural, social, and atmospheric sciences. The project goal is to identify whether and how changes in (1) the pattern and scale of land uses, (2) accelerating immigration from other regions, (3) rural-urban migration patterns, and (4) regional climatic patterns, particularly shifts in seasonality, interact to alter fire use, fire spread, fire control, and losses due to uncontrolled burns. Models will link these multiple, complex, and non-linear processes to change in the probability of uncontrolled fires.
This project will result in better understanding of how biological, social, and atmospheric processes are coupled to alter the danger of fire damage in complex and rapidly evolving tropical landscapes. The work will have implications not only for much of Amazonia, but also for other tropical developing regions. Results will help policy makers, communities, and farmers avert even more fire catastrophes expected with global climate change, and they will help guide appropriate resource use and management. The models will also be used to evaluate the implications of different policies and to suggest specific policy interventions. Activities will be specifically designed to disseminate results and recommendations to policymakers, local scientists and technicians, students, and members of local communities. These will include informal meetings, production of informative and didactic materials, training courses, and other outreach media. Three postdoctoral scientists will be trained in these interdisciplinary research methods, and numerous undergraduate and graduate students are expected to be involved in the project.
