Simulation study demonstrates fuel moisture and wind dictate fire behavior in Mediterranean forests, highlighting the importance of 3D structural heterogeneity in wildfire modeling.
Incorporating explicit spatial heterogeneity in fuel characterization will reduce uncertainty in fire modelling, especially in Mediterranean forests which are characterized by complex structures. We provide a reproducible workflow to integrate bulk density estimates derived from terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) data into Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), and evaluate fire behavior sensitivity to wind speed and fuel moisture content (FMC) in two Mediterranean forest plots. The methodology incorporates the 3D fuel distribution into FDS derived from point clouds. 210 simulations were conducted by modifying wind speed and vegetation FMC. Results confirm the strong negative effect of FMC on fire behavior, the positive effect of wind on fire propagation, and evidencing the importance of their combined effect. Fire behavior sensitivity proved to be strongly scenario-dependent, demonstrating that structural heterogeneity plays a critical role with direct implications for assessing fire propagation probability under varying moisture and wind regimes in real forest stands.
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Simó-Martí et al. (2026) studied this question.
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