Fire in the Canastra National Park: background, challenges and solutions

• Ano de defesa: 2017
• Autor(a) principal: Eugênia Kelly Luciano Batista
• Orientador(a): José Eugênio Cortes Figueira
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ecologia, Conservacao e Manejo da Vida Silvestre
• Departamento: ICB - INSTITUTO DE CIÊNCIAS BIOLOGICAS
• País: Brasil
• Palavras-chave em Português: Ecologia
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/36145

Every year we watched terrified at the burning and destruction of hundreds of acres of native vegetation. Thousands of plants and animals are killed directly or indirectly by fires with large extensions and high severity, mostly caused by human actions. Managing fire in protected areas of the Cerrado, especially in areas with conflict of interest, is not a trivial task. For decades, Brazilian legislation has promoted policies to combat and suppress total fire in an attempt to conserve biodiversity in savannas without considering that fire has shaped the evolution of plants and biogeochemical cycles for thousands of years on these ecosystems. In this study, we used the example of the Canastra National Park (CNP) to illustrate how current suppression policies can result in inappropriate fire regimes distant from the desired biodiversity conservation goals. In the first chapter, recently published in the Journal of Environmental Management, we have addressed the long history of occupation and use of fire for agricultural purposes long before ParNa Canastra was created, the violent and disastrous regularization process implemented by the Government and the establishment of fire suppression policies after its creation, that led to the fire regime of frequent and severe fires in the Canastra region. We reconstructed the historical fire regime (2000-2015) in the CNP through GIS and remote sensing analyzes using images from the Landsat satellites. We show that i) the Canastra region is a short memory system, which recovers rapidly after burning, being subject to frequent and extensive fires; (ii) fire regimes are different between regulated and non-regulated areas; and (iii) traditional fire use promotes as much burning as out-of-control fires, highlighting the urgent need to settle conflicts between park managers and the local population, in addition to use prescribed fires aiming to deliver the biological conservation outcomes. In the second chapter, we used the accumulated knowledge available in the literature to discuss how an inappropriate fire regime can promote changes in ecosystems and result in the loss of habitats and species. In an attempt to reduce these negative effects and achieve the biodiversity conservation goals, maximum and minimum thresholds related to the different aspects of fire regimes are proposed, such as: frequency, seasonality and extension. Fire regimes far beyond acceptable thresholds should act as a warning to managers about the possibility that current fire patterns may not be able to guarantee the biodiversity conservation in medium and long term.