2007/05/18 by √Ålvaro Corral, Alvaro Corral, Luciano Telesca +1 · 2 citations
Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies #Ecosystem dynamics and resilience #Fire effects on ecosystems #physics.geo-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.77.016101
Not a long paper, but many figures (but no large size in kb)
arxiv created 2007/05/18 · openalex publication_date 2008/01/07 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Forest-fire waiting times, defined as the time between successive fires above a certain size in a given region, are obtained for Italy. The probability densities of the waiting times are found to verify a scaling law, despite that fact that the distribution of fire sizes is not a power law. The meaning of such behavior in terms of the possible self-similarity of the process in a nonstationary system is discussed. We find that the scaling law arises as a consequence of the stationarity of fire sizes and the existence of a nontrivial "instantaneous" scaling law, sustained by the correlations of the process; as a consequence, the nonstationary Poisson process model does not account for all the complexity of the structure of fire occurrence.