"Amazon Forest Burning" - Actually, Recently Leveled Amazon Forest Burning At Record Rate
The prevailing narrative about the Brazilian Amazon this past summer was that the world’s largest rainforest was burning. A more accurate assessment would be that vast areas that used to be forest were burning, according to work by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), a program of the organization Amazon Conservation.
In a study published Nov. 13, the deforestation monitoring group found that 4,500 square kilometers (1,740 square miles) of the Brazilian Amazon — about 1.8 times the size of Luxembourg — was deforested between 2017 and 2019 and then burned. “The key star of the fire season was still deforestation,” Matt Finer, senior research specialist and director of MAAP, said in an interview.
In September, MAAP scientists first revealed that much of the fire in the Amazon that had grabbed the world’s attention in August 2019 was occurring on recently deforested land, not in standing forests. “We’re not seeing too many examples of a fire just appearing out of nowhere,” Finer said. “All the examples we see are of fires burning a recently deforested area. Then they escaped into surrounding forest, but they never turned into this big uncontrolled fire.”
Finer and his colleagues compared satellite forest loss data from Global Forest Watch and the University of Maryland with fire alert data from NASA. They also looked at fire data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) to tease out how much deforestation occurred in 2019. Known as DETER alerts, these points identify burn scars in the forest down to 30-meter (98-foot) resolution.
Map showing deforestation and fires in 2019. Image courtesy of MAAP with data from UMD/GLAD, NASA (MODIS), PRODES and Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA.
EDIT
https://news.mongabay.com/2019/11/deforestation-preceded-fires-in-massive-area-of-amazon-in-2019/