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Countervailing Effects Of Urbanization And Vegetation Extent On Fire Frequency On The Wildland Urban Interface: Disentangling Fuel And Ignition Effects, Owen Price, Ross A. Bradstock

Faculty of Science, Medicine and Health - Papers: part A

Fire activity has been found to follow a humped relationship with population density, but the countervailing drivers and scale effects in this relationship have not previously been teased apart. This is important because it helps us to understand which aspects of fire risk are amenable to management. The likelihood of a fire occurring at the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) can be broken into two components: that of ignitions occurring and that of the fire spreading from the ignition to the interface. We hypothesize that urbanization is a double-edged sword because it both increases the likelihood of ignition but also protects …