Self-Organized Criticality of Wildfires Ecologically Revisited.

Abstract

Wildfire cumulative frequency¿area distributions of Mediterranean landscapes are examined for agreement with self-similar (fractal) behavior. Our results support landscape-specific restricted scaling regions of 1.5¿3.5 orders of magnitude in size, which are delimited by breakpoints or `cut-offs¿. By identifying the extent of such regions in the fractal frequency¿area distribution of wildfires, fractal statistics may give a deeper insight into the scale-invariant dynamics of fire spread, whereas the observed cut-offs may be related to changes in the process¿pattern interactions that control wildfire propagation at the landscape scale.