  Many examples of chemical and biological processes take place in large-scale
environmental flows. Such flows generate filamental patterns which are often
fractal due to the presence of chaos in the underlying advection dynamics. In
such processes, hydrodynamical stirring strongly couples into the reactivity of
the advected species and might thus make the traditional treatment of the
problem through partial differential equations difficult. Here we present a
simple approach for the activity in in-homogeneously stirred flows. We show
that the fractal patterns serving as skeletons and catalysts lead to a rate
equation with a universal form that is independent of the flow, of the particle
properties, and of the details of the active process. One aspect of the
universality of our appraoch is that it also applies to reactions among
particles of finite size (so-called inertial particles).
