Scaling properties in forest fire sequences: The human role in the order of nature

Abstract

Since the 1990s, forest-fire models focused on self-organized criticality behaviour on both spatial and temporal scales. Recent related studies have suggested that the spatial fractality of wildfires is due to the heterogeneous distribution of forest mass (frequency–size distribution fitted to a power-law). However, the differences observed between real data and simulated data, due to the multiplicity of interacting factors, many of them unknown, remain unclear. As the great majority of forest fires are caused by humans, in the present work, we have studied spatial and temporal distributions of forest-fire sequences detected in the eastern part of Spain, depending on the wildfire origin. We showed how humans modify spatial and temporal scale invariant properties, playing a role in the order of nature. This human impact, especially, has important implications: decreasing the inter-event interval and increasing the “sparking frequency” on forest-fire modelling.