Forest Fire & Self-Organized Criticality

Parameters

Growth rate p: 0.050 (per empty cell/step) Lightning rate f: 0.0005 (per tree/step) Simulation speed:

Statistics

Fire Size Distribution

Pause Reset Clear Distribution

The forest-fire model self-organizes to a critical state without tuning any parameter. Fire sizes follow a power law P(s) ∝ s^{-α} with α ≈ 1–2. At criticality, large events (spanning fires) coexist with small ones across all scales — the hallmark of SOC (Bak, Tang, Wiesenfeld 1987).