Vegetation fires in the peatlands of sumatra in 2019

Abstract

Tropical rain forests in their original undisturbed state do not burn easily. But human intervention such as logging, peatland draining and conversion of natural ecosystems into plantation and small holder agriculture area has made natural ecosystems in the humid tropical insular Southeast Asia vulnerable to fires. During the past decades, vegetation fires in tropical regions have attracted attentions and become an important global environmental issue. The peatlands of Sumatra, especially in the provinces of Riau, Jambi and South Sumatra, have been the main fire areas. In this study we used Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) active fire hotspots, peatland distribution maps and a peatland land cover map to investigate the temporal and spatial distributions and characteristics of fire activity in this region in 2019. We also compared the characteristics of fire distribution in 2019 with the previous 10 years from 2009 to 2018. Our results shown that nearly two third (63.5%) of the fires were located in peatlands that covered 27.25% of the three provinces. The peatland fire density was 4.6 times that of the mineral soils. The hotspots in 2019 were mainly contributed by industrial plantations and small holder areas as in the previous years. However, there was evidence of increasing fire activities in the less managed land cover classes of ferns/low shrub and previously cleared land areas. They were found to have the highest hotspots density suggesting increased land conversion activities in these areas. The total number of hotspots (26627) detected in 2019 was only slightly higher than the average over the previous 10 years. However, the fire season in 2019 lasted until November, unlike the previous 10 years. The longer fire season was due to the dryer and hotter month of November in 2019.