Simulation of variations in the speed of fire propagation, during a prescribed burn

Abstract

Fire behavior simulations are generally based on standardized models of forest fuels, which can hardly represent allpossible variations in forest ecosystems, which can result in biased estimates of fire behavior. Due to this, in the presentwork a comparative analysis of simulations of fire behavior (propagation rate [m/min]) is made, during the course of aprescribed burning in favor of the slope, in a pine-oak forest stand from the state of Chihuahua. These simulations varied inrelation to: a) fuel models; b) fuel loads; and c) wind speed. The models tested were: 1) the one that resulted from amultiple regression (considering temperature, relative humidity and slope); 2) the fuel model M-8 and its variant M-8R(includes the values of fuel charges obtained in the field); and 3) the fuel model M-9 and its variant M-9R (includes thevalues of fuel charges obtained in the field). The equations of the trends defined by the correlation between the relativehumidity (%) and the speed of fire propagation (m/min) were generated. Although neither model was found to bestatistically significant, the best fit was defined with the regression equation:, which can be used in apractical way for a rough estimation of the rate of fire spread (RP). It is concluded that, in general, the selected modelswere not appropriate for simulating fire behavior during prescribed burning. This highlights the need to generate specificfuel models for the analyzed vegetation and its variations in density, structure and composition