May 4, 2022 - Deforestation around Xingu National Park in Brazil

Deforestation around Xingu National Park in Brazil
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The state of Mato Grosso sits deep in the Amazon interior of Brazil.
Once covered with verdant green rainforest and isolated, the incursion
of railroads, highways, and airplanes eventually connected Mato Grosso
to the outside world. By the early twenty-first century, widespread
change was evident across all of the state, as well as much of South
America’s rainforest. Widespread deforestation had become rampant.

As early as the 1960’s the Brazilian government had the foresight to
create some protected areas in the rainforest. A notable achievement
was the creation of Xingu National Park and Indigenous Peoples
Preserve, an expanse of about 8,530 square miles (22,090 square km) in
the northeastern part of Mato Grosso. With the land centered on the
Xingu River, the park was set aside to preserve biodiversity as well as
to allow a traditional life for the four major aboriginal language
families in Brazil, the Tupi, Arawak, Carib, and Ge. The ecology of the
Xingu reflects a transitional zone between the vegetation of the
cerrado (tropical savannah) and the Amazonian rainforest. It is one of
the last remaining stand of rainforest in northern Mato Grosso to this
day.

The 1990s and 2000s saw what has been called “open season on the
rainforest”, with ranchers, soy farmers, land speculators, loggers and
miners able to clear just about any land that they wanted. During that
time, Brazilian rainforest was sometimes losing more than 20,000 square
kilometers (8,000 square miles) per year, an area nearly the size of
New Jersey. As the ransacking of the Amazon became widely known—thanks
at least in part due to satellite imagery of the demise of the “lungs
of the world” becoming widely shared with the public—public pressure
started to slow the tide of deforestation. In 2004, the Brazilian
government adopted an aggressive policy called the Action Plan for the
Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm).
The government created a large network of national and state parks,
established protected territories for indigenous groups, strengthened
environmental enforcement agencies, made it more difficult to export
goods produced on illegally deforested land, and strengthened satellite
monitoring systems.

Thanks to the laws, enforcement efforts, public pressure, education,
and rigorous monitoring for deforestation in near-real-time by several
satellite systems, by 2012, forest clearing was still occurring, but at
a much lower rate. Clearing was reported to be down nearly 80 percent,
or roughly 5,000 square kilometers (1,900 square miles) per year. The
turnaround was heralded as one of the world’s most dramatic
environmental success stories. Soon, the type of deforestation also
changed. Because large clear-cuts were easily seen by satellite (and
then stopped by law enforcement), most of those encroaching on the
forest started to clear small patches instead of vast swaths and often
worked during the rainy season, when cloud cover obscured satellite
views.

A major policy change in Brazil occurred in 2019, when the current
President, Jair Bolsonaro, took office. Since that time, environmental
restrictions have been softened or ignored, leading to increasingly
rapid deforestation across all of Brazil. A report published by
Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in November 2021
estimated that 13,235 square kilometers (8,224 square miles) of forest
was lost between August 2020 and July 2021. That was a 22% increase
from the previous year and the largest area lost to deforestation in
the Brazilian Amazon since 2006, when a total area of 14,286 square
kilometers was cleared. In January 2022, the INPE data showed that 430
square km (166 square miles) of the Amazon were cleared in that month
alone—an all-time monthly high.

On May 2, 2022, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer
(MODIS) acquired a true-color image of heavy deforestation around the
Xingu National Park and Indigenous Peoples Preserve. The remaining
forest within the Park appears dark green while areas stripped of
forest, which encircle the Park, appear light green. While the bulk of
the Park remains mostly intact, many reports of incursions of industry
and agriculture into park boundaries exist and seem to be increasing.

To better illustrate the landcover change, the below roll-over
comparison, which was created using the NASA Worldview App, allows easy
evaluation of the same area over time. In this case, the image acquired
on May 2, 2022 (above) can be compared to an earlier image acquired on
April 28, 2003. In the earlier image, the deep green forest stretches
covers much more of the area. By 2022, severe deforestation has
stripped much of the region of trees, especially in the land adjacent
to the southwestern section of Xingu National Park.

To interact with the roll-over comparision, click anywhere on the image
below. The older (2003) image will be on the left side of the screen
and the newest one (2022) will be on the right. To go to a larger view
of the region via the NASA Worldview App, click on the icon in the
upper right of the lower image.

IFRAME:
https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=-57.04275351461797,-13.7161
54695408484,-49.00672297895534,-9.854395576881721&l=Reference_Labels_15
m(hidden),Reference_Features_15m(hidden),Coastlines_15m(hidden),VIIRS_N
OAA20_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor(hidden),VIIRS_SNPP_CorrectedReflec
tance_TrueColor(hidden),MODIS_Aqua_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor(hidde
n),MODIS_Terra_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor&lg=true&l1=MODIS_Combined
_Thermal_Anomalies_Day(hidden),MODIS_Combined_Thermal_Anomalies_All(hid
den),VIIRS_NOAA20_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor(hidden),VIIRS_SNPP_Cor
rectedReflectance_TrueColor(hidden),MODIS_Aqua_CorrectedReflectance_Tru
eColor(hidden),MODIS_Terra_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor&lg1=true&ca=f
alse&cv=46&t=2022-05-02-T14%3A02%3A09Z&t1=2003-04-28-T14%3A02%3A09Z&em=
true

Image Facts
Satellite: Terra
Date Acquired: 5/2/2022
Resolutions: 1km (337.3 KB), 500m (875.6 KB), 250m (514.2
KB)
Bands Used: 1,4,3
Image Credit: MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC



https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/individual.php?db_date=2022-05-04

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