Since July 1st, 1,573 Fires Recorded In Brazil's Pantanal, World's Biggest Wetland; Most Are Manmade
The largest tropical wetland on the planet has experienced an alarming number of man-made fires this month, and experts fear the worst may be yet to come as the dry season intensifies.
Since the start of July, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research has detected 1,573 fires within the country’s Pantanal region—the highest number recorded for the month in 22 years of records. During the first six months of 2020, the number of Pantanal fires more than doubled compared with the same period last year, impacting an estimated 1.5 million acres of land. Fire season in the Pantanal region normally peaks in September, meaning the situation could worsen, posing a severe threat to the wetlands’ unique biodiversity and to a population already reeling from Covid-19.
“The situation is serious,” said Marcos Rosa, the technical coordinator of MapBiomas, a Brazilian research initiative that produces land cover maps for the country. “We have a huge number of fires in some areas that are usually wet wetlands [in July].”
The Pantanal is a 42 million acre wetland spanning southwestern Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. It’s renowned for plant and animal life, which helped a portion of it gain recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. An estimated 4,700 different plants and animals call the Pantanal home, including jaguars, caimans, giant anteaters, capybaras, hyacinth macaws (the world’s largest parrot), and hundreds of fish species. All of the Pantanal’s denizens are adapted to the ebb and flow of water that enters this vast floodplain from upland savannahs during the rainy season from October to April, creating rivers of grass and giant water lily fields that slowly drain during the dry season.
EDIT
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xg85m7/the-worlds-largest-tropical-wetland-is-on-fire
