{"id":452076,"date":"2022-09-19T19:58:53","date_gmt":"2022-09-19T22:58:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=452076"},"modified":"2022-09-19T19:58:53","modified_gmt":"2022-09-19T22:58:53","slug":"scarred-forests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/scarred-forests\/","title":{"rendered":"Scarred forests"},"content":{"rendered":"

When geographer Ane Alencar began her environmental research in the early 1990s, it was still commonly believed that wildfires in rainforests were rare. \u201cIt was also really common to hear the theory that the trees in the Amazon had shallow roots and the soil was poor,\u201d recalls the scientist, who in March became the first Latin American to receive the Leading Women in Machine Learning for Earth Observation award, bestowed by the Radiant Earth Foundation, an American organization that develops machine learning models for observing the planet.<\/p>\n

Awarded on International Women’s Day, the honor recognizes 14 women scientists every year for their environmental preservation work based on data generated by remote sensing systems. \u201cThis is an important award, above all because it highlights the work of women in technology, a field which is generally dominated by men,\u201d says Alencar, who is currently science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), where she heads the MapBiomas platform for the Cerrado (wooded savanna) and MapBiomas Fogo, both of which aim to map and monitor land cover and use in Brazil based on data obtained by satellites.<\/p>\n

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IPAM<\/span>In 2021, the researcher visited a burned area in Pocon\u00e9 in the PantanalIPAM<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Born in Bel\u00e9m and currently living in Bras\u00edlia, Alencar has dedicated her professional career to studying the behavior of fires in the Amazon. While studying geography at the Federal University of Par\u00e1 (UFPA), she did an internship at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA), where she organized her first database, gathering information on the soils in the Amazon. \u201cI have always been passionate about maps and I was fascinated by the opportunity to generate this spatial database of soil profiles that helped clarify the importance of deeply rooted trees in the Amazon with respect to the forest remaining green at all times, even in dry seasons,\u201d she says. During her master’s degree in remote sensing, completed at Boston University, USA, in 2000, Alencar researched fires in Amazonian environments. \u201cAt that time, there was this mistaken idea that fires only occur in more open and fire-adapted ecosystems, such as the Cerrado. Fires in rainforests were seen as very rare events,\u201d she explains.<\/p>\n

For her doctoral thesis, which she defended at the University of Florida in 2010, she investigated the impact of deforestation and climate change on the increasing flammability of the Amazon rainforest. \u201cBecause tropical forests like the Amazon are so wet, natural fires can occur at intervals of time that vary from 200 to 1,000 years. However, we found that due to human intervention, the frequency has decreased to every 12 years in highly fragmented areas of the region,\u201d explains the researcher, who points out that over the last 36 years, fires have destroyed an area larger than England every 12 months, according to satellite images captured between 1985 and 2020.<\/p>\n

Her studies led the scientist to coin the expression \u201cfire scars\u201d to describe forest areas affected by fires.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"International recognition for Brazilian geographer who has spent almost three decades studying the transformations caused by forest fires","protected":false},"author":678,"featured_media":452077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1204],"tags":[206,209,219,200],"coauthors":[2477],"class_list":["post-452076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-careers","tag-biodiversity","tag-biology","tag-computation","tag-environment"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/678"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452076"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":452085,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452076\/revisions\/452085"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452076"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=452076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}