Modeling A Forest Fire: Fighting It
And Its Effects
Abstract

As the number of catastrophic forest fires skyrockets with disturbing speed, more and more of our natural resources are destroyed. The need for better means of combating the problem becomes increasingly apparent. The solution to this is in having better, more accurate ways of predicting and modeling the conditions and forces at work.

We hope to accomplish a complete modeling of a forest, a program to accept user input and tailor the model of the forest to the given information. Our project will make use of twodimensional arrays to model the current state of a forest, including climate, species and average age of the and other relevant information, take this information and quickly create a model and offer an efficient plan of action for fighting the fire. From much the same information and the same modeling techniques, our program could make projections of how the forest would recover and grow decades, even centuries after destruction has occurred.

There would be a significant research component to this project. We would have to acquire knowledge of forestry and environmental engineering. This project would require the use of a supercomputer because of the requirement for large amounts of memory and computing power.