Universal scaling of forest fire propagation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that wildfire spread exhibits universal fractal patterns and critical behavior near the threshold, modeled effectively by a small-world network, indicating a second-order phase transition.

Contribution

It introduces a network model approach to predict wildfire behavior and establishes the universality of critical exponents in forest fire propagation.

Findings

Wildfire patterns are fractal in nature.

Critical exponents are universal across different landscapes.

Propagation transition behaves as a second-order phase transition.

Abstract

In this paper we use a variant of the Watts-Strogatz small-world model to predict wildfire behavior near the critical propagation/nonpropagation threshold. We find that forest fire patterns are fractal and that critical exponents are universal, which suggests that the propagation/nonpropagation transition is a second-order transition. Universality tells us that the characteristic critical behaviour of propagation in real (amorphous) forest landscapes can be extracted from the simplest network model.