English

Universal scaling of forest fire propagation

Physics and Society 2008-05-23 v1

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.

Cite

@article{arxiv.0805.3365,
  title  = {Universal scaling of forest fire propagation},
  author = {Porterie Bernard and Kaiss Ahmed and Clerc Jean Pierre and Zekri Nouredine and Lotfi Zekri},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0805.3365},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

3 pages with 2 tables and 5 figures, submitted to PRL

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:43:03.174Z