Science, Vol.281, No.5384, 1840-1842, 1998
Forest fires : An example of self-organized critical behavior
Despite the many complexities concerning their initiation and propagation, forest fires exhibit power-law frequency-area statistics over many orders of magnitude. A simple forest fire model, which is an example of self-organized criticality, exhibits similar behavior. One practical implication of this result is that the frequency-area distribution of small and medium fires can be used to quantify the risk of Large fires, as is routinely done for earthquakes.