English: Many dozens of fires burning in western Bolivia produced a shroud of smoke that, in many places, hid the landscape from satellite view in early November 2020. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a true-color image of the scene on November 5.

Each red “hot spot” marks an area where the thermal bands on the MODIS instrument detected high temperatures. When combined with typical smoke, as in this image, such hot spots mark actively burning fires. For orientation, the blue lake that sits on the western edge of the image is Lake Titicaca and is shared between Peru (west) and Bolivia. To the south, the large highly reflective area is Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. Both of these sit high in the Andes Mountains, where the air remains smoke-free and no fires are burning. To the east, patches of brown mark agricultural fields that are found in the lowlands. Protected forestland is colored deep green and hugs the base of the Andes as well as a large protected area south and east of the agricultural region.

Many of these fires are clustered in agricultural land, which is not surprising as farmers in the region traditionally use small, controlled fires as a tool to maintain pastures, burn off spent crops, clear brush and forest, fertilize soils and burn trash. Many fires, however, appear in or at the edges of deep green forest, indicating that illegal clearing is occurring or that agricultural fires have slipped control and become destructive wildfires. The 2020 Bolivian fire season—like that in 2019—has been intense, with many wildfires burning across the country from July until the present time and frequently covering much of Bolivia with a pall of smoke. The fires have prompted the government to declare a state of emergency by early October. Rains have eased the wildfires that were burning in eastern Bolivia, but clearly many fires are still active. By some estimates, the wildfires are expected to continue into December.