Environmental risk in Northeast Brazil: estimation of burning areas in Coreaú River Basin, Ceará, Brazil

This work aims to estimate the burned areas in the hydrographic basin of the Coreaú River, State of Ceará, north of Northeast Brazil, which has an area of 10,633.67 km², through the NOAA/AVHRR satellite, between the years from 2010 and 2017. The data were acquired at the base of INPE, where they were tabulated and generated a vector file of points. A density map of the fire sources was elaborated, from which the burned areas were estimated in the watershed studied over the defined period of years. There were 1786 fire outbreaks, totaling an estimated accumulated area of 1187.66 km² of fires, which corresponds to 11.17% of the entire length of the hydrographic basin. The municipality of Mucambo presented a ratio of 40% of its territory comprised by the mapped fires. In relation to the conservation units, they mapped 795 hot spots in their perimeters.