COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY THE
URIARTE LAB Department of Ecology, Evolution &
Environmental Biology |
Research Projects |
Prospective Students |
Fires in Western Amazonia: Understanding the Roles
of Climatic, Social, Demographic, and Land Use Change Collaborators Miguel Pinedo-Vazquez, CERC, Columbia University Ruth DeFries, Columbia
University Christine
Padoch, NYBG / CIFOR Walter
Baethgen, IRI, Columbia University Human activities directly
affect the configuration of the landscape and its dynamics, thus determining
the potential for secondary forest development and persistence. Human
activities also have pervasive effects on forest regeneration though the
duration and intensity of agricultural land use and through different types
of management, including introduction of invasive species, selective
harvesting of timber and non-timber products, and the use of fire. Our project in Peru (Website) explores the links between human land use, forest re-growth, climate,
and the occurrence of large fires.
Such destructive fires have only recently become a major problem along
the upper Ucayali River in the lowland Peruvian Amazon where burning has been
used for centuries to manage agricultural fields, and more recently, to clear
and clean pastures. While still
largely mosaics of small agricultural fields, fallows, diverse gardens and
extensive mature and secondary forests, the landscapes of the region are
being rapidly transformed by clearing for large-scale plantation agriculture
(especially biofuel production), and extensive
ranching, as well as by new patterns of smaller-scale land uses by
non-Amazonian migrants who arrive in large numbers from the coast and
highlands of Peru. Many of these changes have been precipitated or actively
encouraged by a series of economic development policies and decisions taken
at the national and local level. The population dislocations produced by
rapid land use and demographic transformations are compounded by the
uncertainties of a changing climate. Our project investigates
processes of change in land use and abandonment, migration, urbanization, and
climate, and their links to the probability of changes in the incidence, size
and severity of escaped fires. Combing
the approaches and tools of natural, social, and atmospheric sciences,
including detailed field research, remote sensing and modelling my
collaborators and I aim to identify whether and how changes in (1) the
pattern and scale of land uses and resulting landscapes in the region, (2)
accelerating immigration from other regions, (3) long-term and circular
rural-urban migration patterns, and (4) plausible scenarios for change in
regional climatic patterns—particularly shifts in seasonality—interact to
alter patterns of fire use, fire spread, fire control, and losses due to
uncontrolled burns. |