Reply to the Comment by H. Tephany and J. Nahmias on "Percolation in real wildfires" by G. Caldarelli et al.

In a previous paper we analyzed the satellite images of three big wildfires in the Mediterranean area. The main result of this analysis is that the burnt area is quite compact, with a fractalperimeter (at least up to a characteristic scale), with a fractal dimension D = 4/3.In their comment to our paper, Tephany et al. propose another mechanism for the stopping of the progress of the wildfire and the formation of such a perimeter. Following their argument the spread is stopped by a pinning mechanism due to the “reaching of a critical local value of reactants average concentration” for many possible reasons (fuel variations, metereological conditions, topography, and human intervention).We agree completely with Tephany et al. that these are the real causes of the stopping. However, once these causes are identified, one needs a universal mechanism of formation of afractal perimeter with D = 4/3.We then want to stress the fact that our model takes into account the above mechanism in an effective way justified by the universality of the percolation properties.