BoCP-Implementation: US-Sao Paulo: Fire management for effective biodiversity conservation in Brazilian savannas

Fire is increasingly recognized as a natural disturbance that must be actively managed to avoid disaster, ranging from extreme wildfires to loss of fire-dependent organisms and ecosystem function associated with decreasing burned area. In some savannas, including Brazil’s cerrado, fire is necessary, helping to maintain open tree canopies and allowing a continuous and highly diverse grass layer to thrive.

Exactly how fire should be managed to conserve cerrado biological and functional biodiversity remains unclear, however. This work focuses at the interface of stewardship and research to evaluate how fire is being managed in protected areas in Brazil’s cerrado, whether fire policies are effective for conserving vulnerable fire-dependent cerrado plants, and how fire may be used as a tool to increase cerrado resilience.

This work will advance scientific understanding of fire and the maintenance of ecosystem function and biodiversity in savannas, as well as ensuring that Brazil’s national fire policies promote biodiversity and ecosystem function across all of Brazil’s ecoregions. The project will elegantly integrate societal benefits (determination of how well management practices and policies are working) and a variety of training and outreach with cutting-edge research.

To achieve these goals, the research interrogates a) how a new legal framework in Brazil (Law 12651) allowing for the development of integrated fire management policies in protected areas and on private lands has changed fire regimes in flammable savanna ecosystems, b) whether the policies developed under this framework are appropriate to conserving fire-dependent biodiversity in Brazil’s cerrado, and c) the extent to which cerrado ecosystems and biodiversity are vulnerable in a conservation context and whether fire management can be used as a tool to increase cerrado resilience. To do this, methods will involve combining detailed remote sensing mapping of fire history across cerrado protected areas, intensive site-based work in six protected areas, and mapping of cerrado vulnerability.

The six field sites encompass four national parks and two ecological field stations. The work will reach a broad set of participants, including both researchers at Yale and Unicamp and managers at the Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação e Biodiversidade, via a series of participatory management workshops aimed at synthesizing existing fire policy and disseminating information to participants.

The managers will gain experience in field work and receive guidance on the importance of fire for biodiversity conservation. The project includes training opportunities for postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates. Altogether, the work will elucidate the interactions between fire, biodiversity, and ecosystems, an issue of growing importance in the Earth system.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.