Universal scaling in wildfire fractal propagation

A small-world network model is proposed to predict wildfire behavior near critical propagation conditions. It includes long-range connections due to flame radiation and a weighting procedure based on times of degradation and combustion of vegetation. Scaling laws are found universal near the propagation transition. For isotropic propagation, the critical behavior of the usual percolation theory is recovered, whereas, for anisotropic conditions due to wind and/or topography, propagation is fractal with a dimension of 1.3 and a critical exponent of the correlation length of 1.7, following the extrapolation for Euclidian systems. The exponent value agrees well with that of directed percolation.