Fire penetration in standing Amazon forests

Wall-to-wall Landsat images of the Brazilian Amazon from INPE, combined with interviews of local peoples and field checking of vegetation form and composition, are employed to show that infrequent fire has been an important abiotic determinant of forest type - even in central locations far from the climatic transition to savanna and open woodland (cerrado and cerradao). Evergreen Amazon forest types affected by fire over the last century include: "igapo" forest on seasonally inundated sandy soils; white-sand or "campinarana" forest on seasonally waterlogged and well-drained sandy soils; montane forest on well-drained rocky soils; and bamboo-dominated forest on low-permeability 2:1 clay soils. Vine forests may also be fire affected. Extensive fire scars are found even where average annual rainfall is 3600 mm/yr.