title: Forest fires: An example of self-organized critical behavior
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Geological Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-1504, USA.
authors.initials: BD
authors.lastname: Malamud
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Morein
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Turcotte