Assessing land use and cover change, forest degradation and secondary forest databases for better understand of airborne CO2 measurements over the Brazilian Amazon
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Tropical forests are essential for ecosystem services provision and for climate change mitigation. Amazon forest, the largest continue tropical forests in the world, have been decreasing due to deforestation and forest degradation. Brazil, a country containing most of the Amazon forests, also presents the highest deforestation rates within the Pan-Amazonian countries. The CARBAM project has been collecting bimonthly CO2 atmospheric measurements from an airplane since 2010 in the Brazilian Amazon, showing that there is a reduction on the forest capacity to absorb carbon for deforestation and climate change patterns. To understand these CO2 fluxes, we need to analyze the land use and cover change processes including forest degradation and secondary forest growth. Our goal is to assess different databases to better understand deforestation, degradation and secondary forest dynamics in the Amazon. For this, we merged different databases for the period 2010-2018: MapBiomas for land use and cover change; PRODES for deforestation; Bullock et al. (2020) for degradation; and Silva et al. (2020) for secondary forest. We found that, from the total accumulated deforested area in 2018 (17% of the Brazilian Amazon), pasture represent 69% fallowed by secondary vegetation 21% and agriculture 8%. The annual deforested area, smaller than secondary vegetation area, is increasing since 2012. Degradation has a different area each year. The carbon uptake by secondary forest and degradation dynamics is underestimated in the national communications of greenhouse gases, and its mapping is extremely relevant to policy makers to accomplish the National Determined Contribution. The large pasture areas deserve attention because it may permit the secondary forest to increase and provide agriculture expansion areas, decreasing in this way the pressure for deforestation and degradation of primary forest and contributing to preserve biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Amazon forests.
Keywords: Amazon forests, deforestation, degradation, secondary forests, CO2 emissions
ID: 3623188