Wildfires, complexity, and highly optimized tolerance
Open accessAbstract
Recent, large fires in the western United States have rekindled debates about fire management and the role of natural fire regimes in the resilience of terrestrial ecosystems. This real-world experience parallels debates involving abstract models of forest fires, a central metaphor in complex systems theory. Both real and modeled fire-prone landscapes exhibit roughly power law statistics in fire size versus frequency. Here, we examine historical fire catalogs and a detailed fire simulation model; both are in agreement with a highly optimized tolerance model. Highly optimized tolerance suggests robustness tradeoffs underlie resilience in different fire-prone ecosystems. Understanding these mechanisms may provide new insights into the structure of ecological systems and be key in evaluating fire management strategies and sensitivities to climate change.
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Wildfires occur at the intersection of dry weather, available fuel and ignition sources.
“Wildfires occur at the intersection of dry weather, available fuel and ignition sources10.”
From Climate-induced variations in global wildfire danger from 1979 to 2013 (2015) · cites this paper as [10]
Global fire regimes are the combined results of available fuel, ignition sources and conducive fire weather.
“Global fire regimes are the combined results of available fuel, ignition sources and conducive fire weather10.”
From Climate-induced variations in global wildfire danger from 1979 to 2013 (2015) · cites this paper as [10]
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Cui, W., & Perera, A. H. (2008) · International Journal of Wildland Fire · doi:10.1071/wf06145 · Cited by 98 · see citing works
How a new fire‐suppression policy can abruptly reshape the fire‐weather relationship
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Drought in Portugal: Current regime, comparison of indices and impacts on extreme wildfires
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Native Fire Regimes and Landscape Resilience
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Self-citationControls on the spatial pattern of wildfire ignitions in Southern California
Faivre, N., Yufang Jin, A., Goulden, M. L., & Randerson, J. T. (2014) · International Journal of Wildland Fire · doi:10.1071/wf13136 · Cited by 82 · see citing works
Global data-driven prediction of fire activity
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Extreme fire weather in Chile driven by climate change and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
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Evidence for scale‐dependent topographic controls on wildfire spread
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An alternative fire regime zonation for Canada
Boulanger, Y., Gauthier, S., Burton, P. J., & Vaillancourt, M.-A. (2012) · International Journal of Wildland Fire · doi:10.1071/wf11073 · Cited by 76 · see citing works
Effect of Climate on Wildfire Size: A Cross-Scale Analysis
Slocum, M. G., Beckage, B., Platt, W., Orzell, S. L., & Taylor, W. (2010) · Ecosystems · doi:10.1007/s10021-010-9357-y · Cited by 71 · see citing works
Model-specification uncertainty in future area burned by wildfires in Canada
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Prediction of regional wildfire activity in the probabilistic Bayesian framework of Firelihood
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Use of artificial landscapes to isolate controls on burn probability
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Self-citationClimatic and Landscape Influences on Fire Regimes from 1984 to 2010 in the Western United States
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Use of landscape simulation modeling to quantify resilience for ecological applications
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Self-citationCharacterizing Fire-on-Fire Interactions in Three Large Wilderness Areas
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Effects of ignition location models on the burn patterns of simulated wildfires
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Fires, Ecological Effects of ☆
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Coupled economic‐coastline modeling with suckers and free riders
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Overestimation of Fire Risk in the Northern Spotted Owl Recovery Plan
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The compound event that triggered the destructive fires of October 2017 in Portugal
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Boer, M. M., Sadler, R. J., Bradstock, R. A., Gill, A. M., & Grierson, P. F. (2008) · Landscape Ecology · doi:10.1007/s10980-008-9260-5 · Cited by 51 · see citing works
Wildfire, landscape diversity and the Drossel–Schwabl model
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Scaling issues in forest ecosystem management and how to address them with models
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The human–grass–fire cycle: how people and invasives co‐occur to drive fire regimes
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Modelling Human-Fire Interactions: Combining Alternative Perspectives and Approaches
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Active governance of agro-pastoral, forest and protected areas mitigates wildfire impacts in Italy
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Evaluating spatially-explicit burn probabilities for strategic fire management planning
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Global fire size distribution: from power law to log-normal
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Risk to North American birds from climate change‐related threats
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Dynamic Resource Allocation in Disaster Response: Tradeoffs in Wildfire Suppression
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Self-citationMansuy, N., Miller, C., Parisien, M., Parks, S. A., Batllori, E., & Moritz, M. A. (2019) · Environmental Research Letters · doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ab1bc5 · Cited by 44 · see citing works
Self-citationRobust agriculture: Balancing between vulnerability and stability
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Cell2Fire: A Cell-Based Forest Fire Growth Model to Support Strategic Landscape Management Planning
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Using HFire for spatial modeling of fire in shrublands
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Self-citationWildfire and power grid nexus in a changing climate
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Wavelet correlations to reveal multiscale coupling in geophysical systems
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Modelling long-term fire regimes of southern California shrublands
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Sensitivity Analysis of a Fire Spread Model in a Chaparral Landscape
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Forest fire and its key drivers in the tropical forests of northern Vietnam
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- Authors
- Moritz, M. A., Morais, M. E., Summerell, L. A., Carlson, J. M., & Doyle, J.
- Affiliations
- California Institute of Technology (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2005-12-06
- Volume
- 102
- Issue
- 50
- Pages
- 17912-17917
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC1312407
- OpenAlex
- W2052350246
- Cited by
- 276
- References
- 65
- Citations by year
- 2026: 20 · 2025: 28 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 16 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 13 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 15 · 2014: 17 · 2013: 12 · 2012: 13
- FWCI
- 4.13
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- europepmc.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- CaltechAUTHORS (California Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Fire effects on ecosystems
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Ecosystem dynamics and resilience
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Condensed Matter Physics › Theoretical and Computational Physics
- Keywords
- forest fires, fire regimes, fire management, ecosystem resilience, power-law statistics, fire simulation model, complex systems, climate change sensitivity, historical fire records
- MeSH terms
- Computer Simulation, Fires, Models, Theoretical, Ecosystem
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