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HexFire: A Flexible and Accessible Wildfire Simulator
As fire frequency and severity grow throughout the world, scientists working across a range of disciplines will increasingly need to incorporate wildfire models into their research. However, fire simulators tend to be highly complex, time-consuming to learn, and difficult to parameterize. As a resul...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9534040/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36211983 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/land11081288 |
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author | Schumaker, Nathan H. Watkins, Sydney M. Heinrichs, Julie A. |
author_facet | Schumaker, Nathan H. Watkins, Sydney M. Heinrichs, Julie A. |
author_sort | Schumaker, Nathan H. |
collection | PubMed |
description | As fire frequency and severity grow throughout the world, scientists working across a range of disciplines will increasingly need to incorporate wildfire models into their research. However, fire simulators tend to be highly complex, time-consuming to learn, and difficult to parameterize. As a result, embracing these models can prove impractical for scientists and practitioners who are not fire specialists. Here we introduce a parsimonious wildfire simulator named HexFire that has been designed for rapid uptake by investigators who do not specialize in the mechanics of fire spread. HexFire should be useful to such nonspecialists for representing the spread of fire, interactions with fuel breaks, and for integrating wildfire into other types of ecological models. We provide a detailed description of the HexFire simulator’s design and mechanisms. Our heuristic fire spread examples highlight the flexibility inherent in the model system, demonstrate that HexFire can generate a wide range of emergent fire behaviors, and illustrate how HexFire might be coupled with other environmental models. We also describe ways that HexFire itself might be altered or augmented. HexFire can be used as a proxy for more detailed fire simulators and to assess the implications of wildfire for local ecological systems. HexFire can also simulate fire interactions with fuel breaks and active fire suppression. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9534040 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-95340402023-08-11 HexFire: A Flexible and Accessible Wildfire Simulator Schumaker, Nathan H. Watkins, Sydney M. Heinrichs, Julie A. Land (Basel) Article As fire frequency and severity grow throughout the world, scientists working across a range of disciplines will increasingly need to incorporate wildfire models into their research. However, fire simulators tend to be highly complex, time-consuming to learn, and difficult to parameterize. As a result, embracing these models can prove impractical for scientists and practitioners who are not fire specialists. Here we introduce a parsimonious wildfire simulator named HexFire that has been designed for rapid uptake by investigators who do not specialize in the mechanics of fire spread. HexFire should be useful to such nonspecialists for representing the spread of fire, interactions with fuel breaks, and for integrating wildfire into other types of ecological models. We provide a detailed description of the HexFire simulator’s design and mechanisms. Our heuristic fire spread examples highlight the flexibility inherent in the model system, demonstrate that HexFire can generate a wide range of emergent fire behaviors, and illustrate how HexFire might be coupled with other environmental models. We also describe ways that HexFire itself might be altered or augmented. HexFire can be used as a proxy for more detailed fire simulators and to assess the implications of wildfire for local ecological systems. HexFire can also simulate fire interactions with fuel breaks and active fire suppression. 2022-08-11 /pmc/articles/PMC9534040/ /pubmed/36211983 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/land11081288 Text en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Schumaker, Nathan H. Watkins, Sydney M. Heinrichs, Julie A. HexFire: A Flexible and Accessible Wildfire Simulator |
title | HexFire: A Flexible and Accessible Wildfire Simulator |
title_full | HexFire: A Flexible and Accessible Wildfire Simulator |
title_fullStr | HexFire: A Flexible and Accessible Wildfire Simulator |
title_full_unstemmed | HexFire: A Flexible and Accessible Wildfire Simulator |
title_short | HexFire: A Flexible and Accessible Wildfire Simulator |
title_sort | hexfire: a flexible and accessible wildfire simulator |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9534040/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36211983 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/land11081288 |
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