Modeling the emergence of scale-free fire outbreaks in Australia

GIORGIO NICOLETTI; SAMIR SUWEIS; LEONARDO SARAVIA

Venecia

Congreso; Stochastic Models and Experiments In Ecology and Biology; 2021

Università degli Studi di Padova

Between 2019 and 2020 Australia experienced a dramatic bushfire season, with devastating ecological and environmental consequences. In this work we propose a simple model that takes into account the combined effect of the fires spreading and the vegetation regrowth in a spatial fashion, and show that the model predicts a percolation transition where system-size outbreaks appear. We argue that the trajectory in the parameter spaceof the model can be qualitatively related to the effects of climate change, which might eventually push the system close to a second critical point predicted by the model: an absorbing phase transition after which the system will be doomed to never recover.