Abstract

ARMENTERAS, Dolors. Changes in the spatial patterns of burned area in Colombia, what happened in the first two decades of the 21st century?. Rev. acad. colomb. cienc. exact. fis. nat. [online]. 2022, vol.46, n.178, pp.248-260.  Epub Sep 10, 2023. ISSN 0370-3908.  https://doi.org/10.18257/raccefyn.1514.

Colombia has been making progress in monitoring the annual occurrence of forest fires and burned areas, and their relationship with the interannual and intraannual variations of both the climatic conditions that facilitate them and their anthropic causes. At the global level, the changes in the fire regime are documented, but in Colombia, we have not yet established whether the trend over time has been toward an increase in the extension, size, and frequency of fires. The present study is a comparative analysis of the first two decades of the 21st century in terms of the spatial and temporal patterns of detected burned areas to analyze changes in some parameters of the fire regime in the country (total extension, size, spatial configuration of burned patches, and frequency). Information from the monthly burned area product Fire_cci v5.1 derived from MODIS at a resolution of 250 m was used to map monthly all the patches detected as burns (or burn scars) from January 2001 to March 2020. The results indicated that the burned area had high annual and intraannual variability, with February and January as the months most affected by fires. The total monthly area burned tended to decrease in the second decade of the 21st century, but the average size of the burned patches increased from 188.75 ha on average in the first decade to 196.2 ha on average in the second decade when also a greater number of fragments was detected. In terms of frequency, there was high variability, especially in lowland areas where the frequency has increased in the second decade compared to the first. Some properties of the fire regime in Colombia did change and despite a decrease in the total area, the results of the study indicated a clear trend towards more, larger, and more frequent fires.

Keywords : Burned area; Fires; Patterns; Fire regime; MODIS.

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