Emergence of complex dissipative structures in the Bak–Chen–Tang forest fire model

The Bak–Chen–Tang forest fire model (Phys. Lett. A 147 (1999) 297) was proposed as a toy model of turbulent systems, where energy (in the form of trees) is injected uniformly and globally, but is dissipated (burns) locally. We review the existing results on the spatial and temporal distribution of fires and present our recent results on scaling in the higher-order moments. We show that the spatial distribution of fires (dissipation) can also be characterized by extended self-similarity used to describe the moments of energy dissipation in turbulence.