Power laws reveal phase transitions in landscape controls of fire regimes

Publication Date

3-6-2012

Document Type

Article

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. View full text

Publication Title

Nature Communications

Volume

3

First Page

726

DOI

10.1038/ncomms1731

Publisher Policy

open access

Open Access Status

OA Journal

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