HexFire: a flexible and accessible wildfire simulator
As fire frequency and severity grows throughout the world, scientists working across a range of disciplines will increasingly need to incorporate wildfire models into their research. But 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 hypothetical 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 the imposition of prescribed burns. We anticipate that researchers will use HexFire to embed wildfire forecasting functionality within other models, such as population viability simulators. HexFire is open-source, freely available, and integrates with other ecological models, allowing users to simulate fire spread and model the influence of fire on a wide range of ecological systems.