IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/natcom/v3y2012i1d10.1038_ncomms1731.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Power laws reveal phase transitions in landscape controls of fire regimes

Author

Listed:
  • Donald McKenzie

    (Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Lab, US Forest Service, 400 N 34th St #201, Seattle, Washington 98103, USA.)

  • Maureen C. Kennedy

    (School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Box 352100, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA.)

Abstract

Understanding the environmental controls on historical wildfires, and how they changed across spatial scales, is difficult because there are no surviving explicit records of either weather or vegetation (fuels). Here we show how power laws associated with fire-event time series arise in limited domains of parameters that represent critical transitions in the controls on landscape fire. Comparison to a self-organized criticality model shows that the latter mimics historical fire only in a limited domain of criticality, and is not an adequate mechanism to explain landscape fire dynamics, which are shaped by both endogenous and exogenous controls. Our results identify a continuous phase transition in landscape controls, marked by power laws, and provide an ecological analogue to critical behaviour in physical and chemical systems. This explicitly cross-scale analysis provides a paradigm for identifying critical thresholds in landscape dynamics that may be crossed in a rapidly changing climate.

Suggested Citation

  • Donald McKenzie & Maureen C. Kennedy, 2012. "Power laws reveal phase transitions in landscape controls of fire regimes," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 3(1), pages 1-6, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:nat:natcom:v:3:y:2012:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms1731
    DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1731
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1731
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/ncomms1731?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Furniss, Tucker J. & Hessburg, Paul F. & Povak, Nicholas A. & Salter, R. Brion & Wigmosta, Mark S., 2022. "Predicting future patterns, processes, and their interactions: Benchmark calibration and validation procedures for forest landscape models," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 473(C).
    2. Morales, Juan Manuel & Mermoz, Mónica & Gowda, Juan Haridas & Kitzberger, Thomas, 2015. "A stochastic fire spread model for north Patagonia based on fire occurrence maps," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 300(C), pages 73-80.
    3. Pană, Gabriel Tiberiu & Nicolin-Żaczek, Alexandru, 2023. "Motifs in earthquake networks: Romania, Italy, United States of America, and Japan," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 632(P1).
    4. Mark D Penney & Yigit Yargic & Lee Smolin & Edward W Thommes & Madhur Anand & Chris T Bauch, 2021. "“Hot-spotting” to improve vaccine allocation by harnessing digital contact tracing technology: An application of percolation theory," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(9), pages 1-15, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:natcom:v:3:y:2012:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms1731. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.