Megafire:An ambiguous and emotive term best avoided by science

Background: As fire regimes are changing and wildfire disasters are becoming more frequent, the term megafire is increasingly used to describe impactful wildfires, under multiple meanings, both in academia and popular media. This has resulted in a highly ambiguous concept.Approach: We analysed the use of the term ‘megafire’ in popular media to determine its origin, its developments over time, and its meaning in the public sphere. We subsequently discuss how relative the term ‘mega’ is, and put this in the context of an analysis of Portuguese and global data on fire size distribution.Results: We found that ‘megafire’ originated in the popular news media over 20 years before it appeared in science. Megafire is used in a diversity of languages, considers landscape fires as well as urban fires, and has a variety of meanings in addition to size. What constitutes ‘mega’ is relative and highly context-dependent in space and time, given variation in landscape, climate, and anthropogenic controls, and as revealed in examples from the Netherlands, Portugal and the Global Fire Atlas. Moreover, fire size does not equate to fire impact.Conclusion: Given the diverse meanings of megafire in the popular media, we argue that redefining megafire in science potentially leads to greater disparity between science and practice. Megafire is widely used as an emotive term that is best left for popular media. For those wanting to use it in science, what constitutes a megafire should be defined by the context in which it is used, not by a metric of one-size-fits-all.</p

Using Game Theory to Analyse Local and Global Performance of Traffic Signal Control Strategies

One of the most important bottlenecks that contributes to the congestion of traffic is nonoptimal traffic signal control. Techniques that have been investigated to optimise traffic signal control have been focused on improving the traffic flow through individual intersections. However, if intersections are optimised based on only reducing local congestion, this could result in introducing congestion in other places. Therefore, this paper introduces a normal form game that can be used to analyse the impact on local and global performance when optimising traffic signal control. Results obtained from a realistic traffic simulation suggest that it is sometimes possible for each player to choose a traffic signal control strategy that optimises its own welfare but also maximises the social welfare. The results also indicate that sub-optimal traffic signal control strategy profiles can become optimal when exposed to certain traffic intensities.CSE3000 Research ProjectComputer Science and Engineerin