Self-organized criticality of wildfires ecologically revisited

Wildfire cumulative frequency-area distributions of Mediterranean landscapes are examined for agreement with self-similar (fractal) behavior. Our results support landscape-specific restricted scaling regions of 1.5-3.5 orders of magnitude in size, which are delimited by breakpoints or 'cut-offs'. By identifying the extent of such regions in the fractal frequency-area distribution of wildfires, fractal statistics may give a deeper insight into the scale-invariant dynamics of fire spread, whereas the observed cut-offs may be related to changes in the process-pattern interactions that control wildfire propagation at the landscape scale. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.