The construction and expansion of highways aiming to improve the integration of the most isolated regions in Brazil facilitated the access to many inhabited areas in the Amazon biome, but had as a consequence assisted the degradation of many of these regions. Over the last two decades, we have observed in this biome a gradual diversification and intensification of land uses through vegetation loss and an increase in fire associated with deforestation and an increase in grazing areas. We used data from several active fires products derived from 14 different satellites, available on the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE). We evaluated the influence of highway infrastructure on fire occurrence inside and around Indigenous Lands (IL) located in the Brazilian Amazon biome, from 2008 to 2021. We classified 332 ILs into “cut by highways”, “without highways”, and “with highways in a 10 km buffer”. We performed: (a) the descriptive statistics of the fire occurrence by state, by season, and by type of land use and land cover (LULC) affected by fire; (b) the spatial distribution of the active fire density; and (c) a simple linear regression model between the fire occurrence and the IL area. Our results showed that in total, 16–46% of the fires occurred within the IL in most of the states, while the 10 km buffer was the region most affected by fire. We confirmed that in the last three years there was a significant increase in the number of active fires, representing anomalies in fire occurrence across the studied period. We discussed the result implications and the role of the highway network in environmental degradation inside and around the ILs located in the Brazilian Amazon.

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Highway Network and Fire Occurrence in Amazonian Indigenous Lands

Land use and green crime: Assessing the edge effect

ABSTRACT The Caatinga biome is the largest and wettest semi-arid environment globally, occupying 10% of the Brazilian territory. Half of the original vegetation from the Caatinga has already been deforested. This research aims to identify the factors associated with Caatinga deforestation (2010–2016). Therefore, the researchers used Geographically Weighted Regression to analyse the drivers of deforestation at the municipal level. Our results showed that five factors are crucial for understanding the spatial variability of deforestation in the Caatinga biome: agricultural credit, cattle, goats, distance from roads, and mining activities. The results were interpreted carefully since the semi-arid Biome is marked by regional asymmetries, mixing subsistence agriculture with agribusiness (MATOPIBA and Vale do Rio São Francisco). The outcome maps allow us to discuss the implication of spatial arrangements and intervention policies towards sustainability.

Spatial modelling of deforestation-related factors in the Brazilian semi-arid biome

This research evaluates the relationship between the official and unofficial road network and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon within and around 332 indigenous lands from 2008 to 2021. The study uses infrastructural and environmental data. Two analyses were performed: clustering by the Gaussian Mixture Model to find group similarities and regressions by weighted least squares (WLS) and the generalized linear models (GLM) to extract factors related to deforestation considering the complete set and the clusters. The results revealed six clusters. Some suffer direct impacts from roads, while others are better preserved. Regression models revealed active fires, illegal mining, and that unofficial roads within ILs to be the drivers for deforestation. The general results indicated that for every 1 km of an additional unofficial route, deforestation increases by 0.036 km2. However, when analyzing the regression models for clusters, we concluded that only 45% of the lands are currently affected by road infrastructure. 

Pedro Monteiro de Almeida Junior

Papers

Influence of deforestation inside and outside indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon Biome