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Fires are both a cause and consequence of important changes in the Amazon region. The development and implementation of better fire management practices and firefighting strategies are important steps to reduce the Amazon ecosystems’ degradation and carbon emissions from land-use change in the region. We extended the application of the maximum entropy method (MaxEnt) to model fire occurrence probability in the Brazilian Amazon on a monthly basis during the 2008 and 2010 fire seasons using fire detection data derived from satellite images. Predictor variables included climatic variables, inhabited and uninhabited protected areas and land-use change maps. Model fit was assessed using the area under the curve (AUC) value (threshold-independent analysis), binomial tests and model sensitivity and specificity (threshold-dependent analysis). Both threshold-independent (AUC = 0.919 ± 0.004 …