## 1 Introduction  
The Brazilian Pantanal is considered one of the world's major floodplains [1], characterized as a shallow flood pulse ecosystem formed of a complex mosaic of vegetation types [2]. The Pantanal is widely known for its wealth of charismatic Neotropical biodiversity and key ecosystem services, such as land-use revenues based on ecotourism. In recent years, wildfires have intensively impacted vast areas of the Pantanal, with a record of \(\sim\)3.2 million hectares of vegetation burnt in September 2020, corresponding to 22% of the entire biome [3], and an estimated mortality of some 17 million vertebrates [4]. Over the past two decades, the concentration of active fires reached its highest peak in September 2020, when 8106 fire conflagrations were detected, whereas 2887 fires were recorded during the same period in 2019. Compared with the historical data, 18,223 fire foci were mapped between January and September 2020--the highest rate recorded since 1998 during this period [5]. This has raised serious concerns, both in Brazil and internationally, over the future of the Pantanal wetland and its globally renowned wildlife [6]. Most of these fires are induced by humans, affecting ecosystems and degrading native biodiversity, in addition to contributing to rising temperatures [7; 8], reduced rainfall [9], and the increasing occurrence of forest fires [7; 10; 11; 12]. These changes in ecosystem flammability also led to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, detrimentally affecting air quality and contributing to climate change at regional to global scales [13]. Changes in land use in the Pantanal biome, observed over the last century, are primarily due to the prevalence of bovine livestock, the rearing of which has constituted one of the main economic activities in the region since the earliest 17 th century settlements and which has been favoured by the baseline abundance of natural grasslands. However, inadequate management, such as the use of fire for clearing pasture, results in irreversible damage to the region and contributes to the emission of GHGs [14; 15]. In Brazil's last (2017) agricultural and livestock census, the overall bovine sector in this biome exceeded 5 million head of cattle [16], making it the predominant economic activity across the region. Moreover, to ensure higher livestock yields and greater profitability, native pastures across extensive cattle ranches have been gradually replaced by an African grass species (_Brachiaria hunidicola_ ([PERSON]) that supports higher bovine stocking rates [8]. Increasing wildfire and deforestation rates coincide with the growth in livestock farming across the region [8], for which fire is the cheapest and most traditional method of clearing vegetation [7; 17]. As bovine stocking rates across the Pantanal average only 0.5 to 0.8 head per hectare, increasingly larger areas are required; this represents a grass-fed extensive cattle ranches model [14] which uses native and/or cultivated pastures [18]. However, in addition to biodiversity loss [4; 19], fires affect the carbon cycle [13], degrade natural habitats [20], and are affected by the amount of aboveground biomass [21]. Such consequences directly contradict the COP 21 multilateral agreement signed in Paris to reduce GHG emissions and mitigate global warming, in signing which Brazil committed to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030 [17; 22]. Remote sensing can be used to analyze and monitor both the proliferation of fires and other biophysical variables that may increase fire risk. These variables include Gross Primary Productivity (GPP), which can be used to estimate dry matter production through a biophysical model [23] that characterizes the total amount of CO\({}_{2}\) in photosynthesis [24]. Therefore, GPP can be used as a proxy of the growth of pastures in the Pantanal and other biomes. In the aftermath of increasingly severe wildfires in recent years throughout the Pantanal, there has been much discussion over the drivers that either aggravate or suppress fire risk in this biome.