A Multi-Scale Network with Percolation Model to Describe the Spreading of Forest Fires

Abstract

Forest fires have been a major threat to forest ecosystems and its biodiversity, as well as the environment in general, particularly in the Mediterranean regions. To mitigate fire spreading, this study aims at finding a fire-break solution for territories prone to fire occurrence. To the effect, here follows a model to map and predict phase transitions in fire regimes (spanning fires vs. penetrating fires) based on terrain morphology. The structure consists of a 2-scale network using site percolation and SIR epidemiology rules in a cellular automata to model local fire Dynamics. The target area for the application is the region of Serra de Ossa in Portugal, due to its wildfire incidence. The study considers the cases for a Moore neighbourhood of warm cells of radius 1 and 2 and also considers a heterogeneous terrain with 3 classes of vegetation. Phase transitions are found for different combinations of fire risk for each of these classes and use these values to parametrize the resulting landscape network.