Experiences and Lessons Learnt in Wildfire Management with PROPAGATOR, an Operational Cellular‐Automata‐Based Wildfire Simulator

Mediterranean basin is notoriously prone to wildfires, a natural hazard that jeopardizes the environment, properties and human lives. The vast majority of the wild-land fires in the Mediterranean landscape are caused by human activities being them accidental or deliberate; however, natural ignitions caused by lightning are not entirely negligible and can be increased by climate change. This chapter describes PROPAGATOR, a wildfire simulator that relies on Cellular Automata for fast scenarios developments. The taxonomy of the state-of-art mathematical models for wildfire simulation is described. The history of PROPAGATOR development and implementations is outlined. The case study of several recent wildfires in Liguria, Italy and Catalonia, Spain are also described. Mathematical models for wildfires usually fall into one of the following categories: empirical and semi-empirical models, macroscopic-deterministic models, and stochastic lattice/grid-based models.