FOREST-FIRES - AN EXAMPLE OF SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICAL-BEHAVIOR

Despite the many complexities concerning their initiation and propagat ion, forest fires exhibit power-law frequency-area statistics over man y orders of magnitude. A simple forest fire model, which is an example of self-organized criticality, exhibits similar behavior. One practic al implication of this result is that the frequency-area distribution of small and medium fires can be used to quantify the risk of Large fi res, as is routinely done for earthquakes.