Amazon's Carbon Sequestration Potential: A Spatial Analysis of Post-Fire Secondary Forests

Global climate is increasingly showing an enhanced spatial and temporal variability of dry periods, leading to prolonged drought seasons in many parts of the Amazon forest (Martin et al., 2013). The practice of forest clearing and burning for land conversion, combined with these prolonged dry periods that further dries the biomass, is likely to result in the occurrence of more intense and larger fires (Doughty et al., 2015). Understanding how burned tropical areas recover and how carbon capture varies in areas with different characteristics is fundamental to the management and monitoring of this ecosystem. This study utilizes moderate resolution geospatial data from MapBiomas (Souza Jr & Azevedo, 2017), encompassing land use and land cover maps, annual burned areas and secondary vegetation, to comprehensively identify and map post-fire secondary forests throughout the Brazilian Amazon. Then, we employ 16 different models to estimate above ground carbon accumulation (Heinrich et al., 2021) for each state in the Amazon Basin. By incorporating fire scars, secondary forest age, and regional carbon uptake models, our algorithm provides a geographically explicit assessment of the Amazon's carbon sequestration potential through secondary forest regeneration. This research offers critical insights for policymakers and conservation efforts at the state level, enabling the development of targeted strategies to promote secondary forest recovery and maximize the Amazon's role in mitigating climate change. Additionally, by providing a more accurate picture of Amazonian carbon sequestration, this work can inform the design of a Brazilian carbon cap-and-trade system, potentially allowing for the inclusion of secondary forests in carbon credit generation.