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How Long Does It Take to Stop a Forest Fore Based on the Density of Trees

Decent Essays

Investigation Plan

Introduction
I will be conducting an experiment which involves burning a forest to test the progression of the forest fire in relation to the high density of trees in the forest. The general hypothesis in this case would suggest the higher the density of trees, the further the fire would progress. I will be conducting various tests to test this hypothesis. The variable that I will be changing is the population of trees within the forest. To carry out this experiment I will be using a simulation which is created by the use of a Net Logo environment.

Method
To carry out this experiment I will use various tree densities to test how much of the forest will burn. I will be using the ticks to see how long it would take for …show more content…

The results are showing that as the density is decreasing so is the percentage being burnt. This time the ticks increased showing the time taken to burn has increased. However, in this table I have got an outlier. This outlier could have been caused by human fault. The outlier shows that this piece of result wasn’t accurate as it is totally different from the rest of the repeats.

Density Repeat % Burnt Ticks
50%
1 2.0% 295 2 1.8% 260 3 3.4% 190 4 2.5% 199 5 2.6% 175 Average 1.5% 223.8

The table above shows that an average of 1.5% of the trees got burnt when the tree density was 50%. These results show a significant drop in the percentage of the trees burnt. In addition, the ticks have also decreased.

Density Repeat % Burnt Ticks
25%
1 0.5% 35 2 0.6% 46 3 0.7% 39 4 0.5% 39 5 0.7% 43 Average 0.6% 40.4

The table above shows that the average percentage of the tree’s being burnt is 0.6% when the tree density was only 25%. The ticks show an average of 40.4. If you compare this table to the table with a density of 99% you can see there has been a significant drop in the percentage burnt as well as the ticks.

The density of trees from 60% to 50% shows a significant change in the percentage burnt as well as ticks. The average percentage burnt for the density 60% was 66.9% whereas for the density 50% the percentage burnt was an average of 1.5%. This

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