Category: Ecology

Summary: Testing whether burn-scar recovery suppresses spanning fires most strongly when landscape flammability has an intermediate correlation length.

Wildfire spread depends not just on average dryness, but on how moisture is arranged across the landscape and how previous burns alter future flammability. This experiment studies a forest-fire model with patchy moisture heterogeneity, burn-scar recovery, and wind to ask which spatial scale of disorder most effectively limits large fires.

The central idea is that intermediate correlation length may be the most suppressive regime. Very fine disorder tends to average away, while very coarse disorder can leave large bypass corridors that line up with the wind. Burn scars may therefore matter most when heterogeneity is patchy enough to interrupt spread without simply creating broad alternative routes.

That focus on the interaction between environmental memory and spatial pattern is what distinguishes the experiment. It asks how recovery from past fires combines with landscape structure to shape the probability of system-spanning events.

Method: Repeated forest-fire simulations with wind, burn-scar recovery, and spatially correlated moisture heterogeneity across multiple correlation lengths.

What is measured: Spanning-fire frequency, fire size, dependence on moisture correlation length, burn-scar suppression effect, and wind-aligned bypass behavior.