Quantifying the environmental limits to fire spread in grassy ecosystems.

ABSTRACT: Modeling fire spread as an infection process is intuitive: An ignition lights a patch of fuel, which infects its neighbor, and so on. Infection models produce nonlinear thresholds, whereby fire spreads only when fuel connectivity and infection probability are sufficiently high. These thresholds are fundamental both to managing fire and to theoretical models of fire spread, whereas applied fire models more often apply quasi-empirical approaches. Here, we resolve this tension by quantifying thresholds in fire spread locally, using field data from individual fires (n = 1,131) in grassy ecosystems across a precipitation gradient (496 to 1,442 mm mean annual precipitation) and evaluating how these scaled regionally (across 533 sites) and across time (1989 to 2012 and 2016 to 2018) using

SUBMITTER: Cardoso AW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9245651 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature