Forest-fire models as a bridge between different paradigms in Self-Organized Criticality

Proshun Sinha-Ray, Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen

Published 1999-09-01Version 1

We turn the stochastic critical forest-fire model introduced by Drossel and Schwabl (PRL 69, 1629, 1992) into a deterministic threshold model. This new model has many features in common with sandpile and earthquake models of Self-Organized Criticality. Nevertheless our deterministic forest-fire model exhibits in detail the same macroscopic statistical properties as the original Drossel and Schwabl model. We use the deterministic model and a related semi-deterministic version of the model to elaborate on the relation between forest-fire, sandpile and earthquake models.