2008/05/21 by Bernard Porterie, Porterie Bernard, Bernard, Porterie +9
Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Fire effects on ecosystems #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0805.3365
3 pages with 2 tables and 5 figures, submitted to PRL
arxiv created 2008/05/21 · openalex publication_date 2008/05/21 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.