资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

The Amazon region is expected to become an amplified fire-prone system, but the mechanism of fire occurrence is not fully understood. Here, we employed more than 300,000 Sentinel-2 images acquired during 2016–2019 and compiled a high-resolution inventory of active fires (AFs) over the Amazon. We found that the fire activities in the Amazon in 2019 did not stand out compared with those in 2017 as a whole. However, the number of fires increased in 2019 in the absence of an exceptional drought, suggesting increased human disturbance in the Amazon. The high-resolution AF inventory further demonstrated that over 90% of detected AFs were associated with humans clearing deforested fields on forest fringes for agricultural land expansion. Additionally, our inventory indicated that satellite sensors with coarser spatial resolution could miss considerable small fires, especially at the sensitive agriculture–forest interface, which therefore should be targeted as a priority conservation area.