Fire in South America’s wetlands: temporal and spatial patterns

Although holding high levels of biodiversity and providing uncountable ecosystem services, wetlands remain poorly understood and protected, particularly in South America, where these ecosystems are being destroyed quickly by infrastructure facilities, land-use change, water pollution, and fire, mostly related to climatic triggers. Nevertheless, few studies have assessed and synthesized fire patterns among South American wetlands. The lack of an overarching view on this issue has constrained our knowledge of how fire patterns affect these ecosystem, and thus hindered integrated fire management at a large scale. Overlapping wetland maps to terrestrial ecoregions and satellite-derived fire activity indicators, we ranked ecoregions mostly affected by wetland fires. Of 109 South America's ecoregions, the Pantanal, Cerrado, Llanos, Beni savanna, and Humid and Dry Chaco accounted for the most of fire foci on wetlands and the largest burned wetland area. There is a pressing need to create a cross national system based on warnings, helping decision-makers, local communities, scientists, and fire brigades to properly manage fires in South America's wetlands at a large scale.