Manoela Machado Ph.D.

  • Postdoctoral Researcher
Manoela Machado

Dr. Manoela Machado studies fire risk in the Amazon forest and its drivers, including climate change and human activity, such as deforestation and selective logging. She hopes to develop a better understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns of fire under a changing climate.

Dr. Machado’s current work aims to identify the gaps between fire-related data and key people working on the ground making firefighting decisions. By speaking with firefighters from different regions and Indigenous communities in Brazil, she is trying to bridge those gaps—facilitating the search for data and suggesting strategic methods to prevent fire in the Amazon.

While earning a B.Sc. in Biological Sciences at the University of Sao Paulo, Dr. Machado studied tropical restoration in many parts of the Atlantic forest and visited the Amazon for the first time, falling in love with the amazing forest. Dr. Machado completed her Ph.D. in Ecology and Conservation at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., focusing on the relationships between selective logging and fire risk in the Amazon. She then developed postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford on the assessment of emergency measures to combat the fire crisis in the Amazon. Dr. Machado also worked as a research assistant at the Tapajós National Forest in Santarém, Pará state and the Sea Turtle Conservation Project TAMAR in Fernando de Noronha, Pernambuco state, Brazil, and as a research consultant with Woodwell Climate’s partner IPAM.

Dr. Machado is proud to fight to protect the Amazon in her home country of Brazil and is motivated to work collaboratively to advance our understanding of fire ecology. She is also a passionate vegan who loves to travel.

The Amazon forest is the largest rainforest on Earth. It harbors an amazing amount of terrestrial biodiversity and stores huge amounts of carbon—it’s the climate regulation system of the planet. Fire quickly transforms all that biomass and shifts the Amazon’s status from carbon sink to source.

Projects

Two human figures darkly silhouetted against an orange sunset

Woodwell Climate @ Tanguro Field Station

Probing tropical ecosystem dynamics at the world’s largest agricultural frontier

Selected Publications

Rapid recovery of thermal environment after selective logging in the Amazon

Mollinari, M. M., C. A. Peres, D. P. Edwards (2019). Agricultural and Forest Meteorology.

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Rapid recovery of thermal environment after selective logging in the Amazon

Mollinari, M. M., C. A. Peres, D. P. Edwards (2019). Agricultural and Forest Meteorology.

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