Category: Ecology

Summary: Testing whether burn-scar memory suppresses large fires most strongly at intermediate ridge-aligned wind channeling in a wildfire model.

Wildfire spread depends both on current wind structure and on the memory left behind by earlier burns. This experiment asks whether refractory burn scars interact with ridge-aligned wind channels in a nonmonotone way, so that intermediate channeling suppresses system-spanning fires more effectively than either weak or extreme alignment.

The model is a stochastic forest-fire simulation with anisotropic terrain-guided transport and burn-scar memory. Rather than searching for a single spectral threshold, it compares spanning-fire outcomes across channeling strengths to identify whether the strongest suppression appears in the middle of the parameter range.

That matters because terrain structure and fire-memory effects are often considered separately. Here the experiment tests whether their interaction creates a distinct corridor regime that changes large-fire risk.

Method: Repeated stochastic wildfire simulations comparing spanning-fire behavior across ridge-channel anisotropy and burn-scar memory conditions.

What is measured: Spanning-fire frequency, burn-scar suppression strength, channeling dependence, and evidence for an intermediate optimum.