Assessment of the Proximity of MODIS Active Fire Detections to Roads and Navigable Rivers in the Brazilian Tropical Moist Forest Biome

The Brazilian tropical moist forest biome supports the world's largest contiguous area of tropical forests and is experiencing high rates of deforestation. Fires are proxy indicators of human pressure and deforestation. Previous studies using satellite active fire detections and the official Brazilian road vector data (IBGE- Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), including state, federal and some private roads, indicate that the majority of fires occur close to roads. In this quantitative study a new data set that also includes unofficial roads and navigable rivers acquired from Imazon (a non-profit research institution with a mission to promote sustainable development in the Amazon) are used to quantify annual distance distributions of MODIS Aqua and Terra satellite active fire detections for 2003 to 2009. The majority (> 93%) of active fire detections are within 10 km of a road or a navigable river bank. Inter-state and inter-annual differences in the distance distributions, that may capture inter-annual rates of road expansion and fire variability, are also presented. These results may be useful for improvement of regional fire prediction models.