Forest wildfires and cellular automata

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to study the properties of wildfire propagation trough the comparison of two different theoretical models: percolation and self-organised criticality. Computer simulations for the two models were performed using a cellular automaton in a 2D lattice using Python. Results show how the percolation model presents a phase transition and SOC behaviour establishes a characteristic frequency of appearance for each fire size that follows a power law.