Recomendações gerais para manejo integrado do fogo em unidades de conservação com mata atlântica na Bahia

Abstract

Many ecosystems around the world are affected by forest fires, which pose a major threat to human health and affect the global climate. The importance and impacts of forest fires vary between ecosystems, which can be dependent on fire, benefiting from fires to maintain their biodiversity and ecological processes, or sensitive to fire. In Brazil, different biomes respond differently to fire occurrence and some, such as the Amazon and Atlantic Forests, may be more vulnerable than others. Therefore, strategies that may make sense in fire-dependent biomes are not suitable for fire-sensitive biomes. The Atlantic Forest is a fire-sensitive ecosystem and like most species of tropical forests, it does not tolerate burning, which can lead to biodiversity loss and impair ecosystem processes and services. On the other hand, fire is widely recognized as an economical tool for land management. Even so, forest fire fighting and suppression policies imposed by governments in many countries ignored the perspectives and interests of social groups such as indigenous peoples and local farmers, resulting in conflicts. However, more recently the scenario of fire management began to change and this element became a strategy for preventing or fighting catastrophic fires. Thus, integrated fire management stands out as an adaptive, transdisciplinary forest management strategy based on reducing the damage caused by fire and increasing its benefits. As the amount of research carried out on this subject differs between countries, our study aimed to identify how research on fire management compares between Brazil and Canada. For this, we compared the number of publications on fire management over time, analyzing the types of studies and the main themes of the studies and comparing the research on fire management among the different biomes found in our study countries, through a bibliometric analysis. The number of publications increased over time in both countries. In Brazil, the most prominent theme was "policy and management", whereas in Canada studies related to climate change appeared more frequently. Studies of different types were well distributed in the Cerrado and Amazon biomes. Therefore, we propose some recommendations for future research on fire management in Brazil, such as giving more attention to biomes that were underrepresented in our review, especially the Atlantic Forest; encourage such research through funding agencies as well as individual researcher initiatives; and research on traditional fire management and co-production with different stakeholders involved in this topic, as this can provide important insights into the best approaches for integrated fire management in different ecosystems. In the second chapter, we aimed to provide a theoretical basis and recommendations for fire management in protected areas with Atlantic Forest, focusing on the state of Bahia. Protected areas are important for the vegetation conservation strategy and protection of the area, but although there are legal instruments to support their creation, plans and strategies are needed that involve the different stakeholders and the surrounding community. However, when it comes to private properties there is no general fire management strategy. We therefore suggest actions based on the scientific literature to be applied in and involving prevention and restoration in protected areas with Atlantic Forest.