Fire Regions of a Northern Amazonian Landscape Relative to Indigenous Peoples’ Lands

Abstract

Highlights: What are the main findings? There is a strong connection between indigenous peoples’ livelihood practices and fires. Fire distribution patterns allowed for four distinct regions to emerge for Guyana, with the Coastal region hosting the most fires, while the Forest region had the fewest. What is the implication of the main finding? Fires within the tropical landscapes influenced by indigenous people’s livelihood activities are an important element in maintaining tropical forest cover and diversity. The fire regions uncovered in our work may serve as the basis for examining the size, impacts, and ignition sources of fires rather than ecosystems. Remotely sensed data have been instrumental in improving our understanding of the nature of fires within tropical landscapes. However, most studies have depicted fires in a negative light, highlighting how land-use and land-cover changes make forests more vulnerable to fire damage. In contrast to such fires, indigenous peoples utilize fires as a key part of their livelihood practices, and such relationships have not been extensively examined using remotely sensed data. In this paper, we utilize MODIS Active Fire data to examine the spatial and temporal distribution of fires relative to indigenous lands across Guyana. We employed the DBSCAN clustering algorithm and Voronoi polygons to examine the patterns of fire distribution across the Guyanese landscape. We found that while indigenous territories accounted for approximately 15% of Guyana’s terrestrial landscape, 25% of fires occurred within Amerindian lands, and 71% within 16 km of village boundaries. A strong linear distance decay (R2 = 0.97) was observed between the occurrence of fires and Amerindian village boundaries. Four previously undefined fire regions emerged for Guyana–Coastal, Forest, Forest Edge North, and Forest Edge South–with the Forest Edge regions hosting the second highest number of fires but the highest indigenous peoples’ presence. The spatial distribution of fires relative to each region suggested that Forest Edge indigenous villages had a strong reliance on fires as a part of their toolkit for maintaining the rich ecological processes characteristically observed around their lands.