title: Wildfires, complexity, and highly optimized tolerance.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, 94720, USA.
authors.forename: Max A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Moritz
authors.forename: Marco E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Morais
authors.forename: Lora A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Summerell
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Carlson
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Doyle
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D017753:Ecosystem; D005390:Fires; D008962:Models, Theoretical