Reducing wildland fire hazard exploiting complex network theory: A case study analysis

Abstract

We discuss a new systematic methodology to mitigate wildland fire hazard by appropriately distributing fuel breaks in space. In particular, motivated by the concept of information flow in complex networks we create a hierarchical allocation of the landscape patches that facilitate the fire propagation based on the Bonacich centrality. Reducing the fuel load in these critical patches results to lower levels of fire hazard. For illustration purposes we apply the proposed strategy to a real case of wildland fire. In particular we focus on the wildland fire that occurred in Spetses Island, Greece in 1990 and burned the one third of the forest. The efficiency of the proposed strategy is compared against the benchmark of random distribution of fuel breaks for a wide range of fuel breaks densities.