A recording of this online seminar is available to view HERE

Speaker: Ane Alencar, PhD, IPAM Amazonia

The alarming increase in fire activities in the Amazon, in the past three years, has been a reflection of Brazil’s political situation, with attacks on environmental laws and weakened environmental institutions. The results of this weakened governance were of greater impact to Amazon forest, causing higher rates of deforestation and degradation, and an increase in illegal activities, mainly land grabbing and logging. The understanding of where, what burned and how much burned is fundamental to determine what have to be done and who to blame in order to avoid a similar fire scenario in the following years.

Ane Alencar is a Geographer with a Master degree in Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System from Boston University and PhD in Forest Resources and Conservation at University of Florida. She is currently Science Director at IPAM and for the past 26 years, she has been working and coordinating a research team dedicated to understand the dynamics of fire, forest degradation and their relationship with land use and climate change, and conservation in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes. She is coordinator of the Cerrado Biome mapping and Brazil fire mapping within the Mapbiomas land use and cover mapping initiative, as well as the Land Use Change Sector of the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimation System (SEEG) initiative.