A Complex Network Theory Approach for the Spatial Distribution of Fire Breaks in Heterogeneous Forest Landscapes for the Control of Wildland Fires (original) (raw)
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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.
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A computational approach for identifying efficient fuel breaks partitions for the containment of fire incidents in forests is proposed. The approach is based on the complex networks statistics, namely the centrality measures and cellular automata modeling. The efficiency of various centrality statistics, such as betweenness, closeness, Bonacich and eigenvalue centrality to select fuel breaks partitions vs. the random-based distribution is demonstrated. Two examples of increasing complexity are considered: (a) an artificial forest of randomly distributed density of vegetation, and (b) a patch from the area of Vesuvio, National Park of Campania, Italy. Both cases assume flat terrain and single type of vegetation. Simulation results over an ensemble of lattice realizations and runs show that the proposed approach appears very promising as it produces statistically significant better outcomes when compared to the random distribution approach.
International Journal of Wildland Fire, 2011
We show how microscopic modelling techniques such as Cellular Automata linked with detailed geographical information systems (GIS) and meteorological data can be used to efficiently predict the evolution of fire fronts on mountainous and heterogeneous wild forest landscapes. In particular, we present a lattice-based dynamic model that includes various factors, ranging from landscape and earth statistics, attributes of vegetation and wind field data to the humidity of the fuel and the spotting transfer mechanism. We also attempt to model specific fire suppression tactics based on air tanker attacks utilising technical specifications as well as operational capabilities of the aircrafts. We use the detailed model to approximate the dynamics of a large-scale fire that broke out in a region on the west flank of the Greek National Park of Parnitha Mountain in June of 2007. The comparison between the simulation and the actual results showed that the proposed model predicts the fire-spread ...
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Forest fires have been common environmental issues that have impacted millions of lives and natural resources. Thus, an in-depth study of the behavior of wildfires is critical in devising preventive strategies to control its rapid spread. However, despite a significant amount of work that has been done in the literature, developing an effective fire spread model is still a challenge. Our goal is to design a model of forest fire propagation and be able to simulate the behavior of cascading fires in the forest. More specifically, we propose INCINERATE 1 , a fire simulator in forest network graphs. A Linear Threshold model, together with various mathematical models from literature, were employed in this simulation that “determines” the behavior of fire propagation. We then propose fire prevention strategies in order to mitigate the damage of forest fires. In particular, we propose the FIGHTER 2 algorithm, a neighborhood-based edge-removal scheme utilizing the Girvan-Newman heuristic. I...
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