Category: Ecology

Summary: Testing whether burn-scar recovery memory suppresses large fires most strongly at intermediate lightning rates under anisotropic wind-driven spread.

Wildfire risk depends not only on ignition and spread, but also on how recently burned areas recover and become flammable again. This experiment asks whether a finite refractory period from burn scars interacts with wind anisotropy to create a nonmonotone window in which system-spanning fires are most strongly suppressed.

The model is a stochastic forest-fire process with directional spread, repeated lightning ignitions, and delayed recovery of burned sites. By comparing recovery times and ignition regimes, it tests whether neither zero memory nor effectively permanent scars captures the strongest suppression.

That makes the study an interaction problem between landscape memory and directional transport. The aim is to identify whether burn history changes fire risk in a qualitatively different way once wind introduces preferred spread corridors.

Method: Repeated stochastic forest-fire simulations with anisotropic spread, burn-scar recovery delays, and varying lightning rates.

What is measured: Frequency of system-spanning fires, dependence on burn-scar recovery time, ignition-rate sensitivity, and evidence for a nonmonotone memory window.