 What we are seeing is that fire is becoming a pervasive force in the Amazon. We are particularly interested to understand what are the factors that influence fire here. How climate, land cover changes in social processes influence fire occurrence and spread. Fire is a fascinating topic and the idea is to keep understanding more, first of all, the mechanisms that explain how different land covers respond to fire and how land covers could be used to mitigate the effects of fire to control or reduce fire activity and at the same time increase the ability of this vegetation to provide ecosystem services. So I am just outside of Pukalpa, Peru. So I'm here in this area studying secondary forests and the effects of fire on secondary forests. So a lot of people talk about how secondary forests are the forests of the future. Secondary forests are expanding all over the world and by secondary forests I'm specifically talking about forests that are regrowing in areas that were once cultivated and once used. And there's a lot of interest in understanding the ecosystem services that these secondary forests can provide and their relevance for conservation. And so here in Pukalpa there's a lot of secondary forests. There's a lot of fallows that are regrowing in areas that aren't being actively used. But there's also a lot of fire. This is very low-tech research. We have a couple of measuring tapes that we use to mark out where the plots are. We have a special measuring tape for tree diameter. We have some calipers that measure the diameter of the little small branches. And then we have our densiometer, which is basically a mirror that we use to measure the canopy opening. But that's about all we need to do this research.