Deliverables

Major deliverables

1. Global fire growth trajectory dataset

The project will produce a standardized dataset describing how fires grow through time. Using satellite burned-area products and the FIRED event reconstruction system, the research team will reconstruct daily fire perimeters for many wildfire events.

Each fire will include:

• perimeter length through time
• burned area through time
• geometric complexity metrics
• environmental metadata

Why this matters

Most fire datasets record final burned area or ignition locations. Few datasets capture the dynamic geometry of fire growth. This dataset would provide a large-scale empirical foundation for studying wildfire expansion as a spatial process.

It also becomes reusable infrastructure for research questions beyond the scaling hypothesis.

2. Open-source scaling diagnostics

The project will develop analytical tools for measuring geometric scaling relationships in wildfire growth.

These tools will include methods for:

• perimeter-time scaling analysis
• fractal dimension estimation
• scaling collapse diagnostics
• geometric comparison of fire trajectories

The diagnostics will be released as modules within CubeDynamics so that other researchers can apply them to both observational data and model outputs.

Why this matters

Current wildfire models are typically evaluated using local metrics such as spread rate or burn severity. Scaling diagnostics introduce a new way to test models: whether they reproduce the large-scale geometry of real fires.

3. Empirical characterization of wildfire scaling

The project will analyze many fire trajectories to determine:

• whether a consistent perimeter growth exponent exists
• when scaling appears during a fire's lifetime
• how scaling varies across ecosystems and climates

This work fills a gap between detailed fire behavior experiments and statistical studies of fire regimes.

Why this matters

Understanding the geometry of wildfire expansion provides insight into how local spread processes scale up to landscape-scale fire behavior.

4. Mechanistic modeling experiments

The project will test candidate mechanisms capable of generating wildfire scaling patterns.

Minimal models will represent processes such as:

• diffusion-like spread
• connectivity-driven spread across heterogeneous fuels
• anisotropic wind-driven propagation
• long-distance spotting

Each model will generate synthetic fire trajectories that can be analyzed using the same scaling diagnostics applied to satellite observations.

Why this matters

This approach connects empirical observations with underlying physical processes and helps identify which mechanisms shape wildfire growth geometry.

5. Benchmark analysis of existing fire models

The scaling diagnostics will be applied to outputs from wildfire simulators such as:

• FARSITE
• WRF-Fire
• FIRETEC

This will reveal whether current fire models reproduce the geometric scaling properties observed in real fires.

Why this matters

This provides a new benchmark for wildfire model validation based on emergent system behavior rather than only local spread rates.

6. Theoretical framework for wildfire growth geometry

The final deliverable is a conceptual synthesis explaining how wildfire growth emerges from interactions among:

• fuel connectivity
• atmospheric forcing
• landscape heterogeneity
• fire spread physics

This framework links wildfire science with broader theories of spatial dynamics and complex systems.