Category: Ecology

Summary: Testing whether intermediate ash persistence reduces megafire spread when wind forcing has temporal memory.

After a fire passes, ash and burned ground can temporarily change how future fire spreads through the landscape. This experiment asks whether that ash-memory effect helps suppress large cross-domain breaches when wind conditions also have temporal memory, or whether long-lived barren corridors eventually align repeated spotting paths and become counterproductive.

The model is a stochastic cellular automaton with both ash persistence and wind persistence as control knobs. It compares short, intermediate, and long ash-memory regimes to see whether transient firebreaks work best when they last long enough to interrupt connectivity but not so long that they organize future spread.

That is a feedback problem rather than a single-fire simulation. The experiment isolates how two different kinds of environmental memory interact to shape megafire risk.

Method: Repeated stochastic cellular-automaton wildfire simulations with tunable ash persistence and wind-memory forcing.

What is measured: Cross-domain breach probability, support for megafires, dependence on ash persistence and wind memory, and evidence for an intermediate protective regime.