NASA MODIS Image of the Day: June 14, 2009 – Fires and Deforestation on the Amazon Frontier, Rondonia, Brazil
The state of Rondonia in western Brazil is one of the most deforested parts of the Amazon.
By the beginning of this decade, the frontier had reached the remote northwest corner of Rondonia, pictured in this pair of images from the MODIS on NASA’s Terra satellite from 2007.
In the image from August 12, 2007 (which you will see if you move your mouse over the main image), intact forest is deep green, while cleared areas are tan (bare ground) or light green (crops, pasture, or occasionally, second-growth forest). The fishbone pattern of small clearings along new roads is the beginning of one of the common deforestation trajectories in the Amazon. New roads (legal and illegal) attract small farmers, who clear some land for crops. When the soil gives out, they convert the old croplands to pasture and clear new forest. When yields fall again and not enough forest remains to clear, they sell or abandon their small holdings to larger-scale ranchers, who consolidate the small farms into large pastures. The main image on this page image, from September 30, 2007, shows one consequence of forest clearing in the Amazon: thick smoke that hangs over the forest at different times throughout the dry season. Fire is the primary tool for clearing land in the Amazon, and it doesn’t always stay where land owners intend it to. It frequently escapes control and invades adjacent forest and pasture. In 2007, the biomass burning season in the Amazon was the most intense of this decade. This smoky sight was common throughout August and September.
