Universal scaling of forest fire propagation

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.