  Prescribed burns have been increasingly utilized in forest management in the
past few decades. However, their effectiveness in reducing the risk of
destructive wildfires has been debated. The sandpile model of self-organized
criticality, first proposed to model natural hazards, has been recently applied
to wildfire research for describing a negative linear relationship between the
logarithm of fire size, in area burned, and the logarithm of the fire incidence
number of that size. In this study, we leverage this powerful sandpile model to
perform a series of simulations demonstrating that prescribed fires indeed
suppress the incidence of destructive wildfires. The same conclusion was
obtained when this method was utilized to analyze historical data of forest
fires from three American states: Florida, California and Georgia. Our study
justifies the application of the sandpile model to wildfire research and
establishes a novel method based on the analysis of slope estimated from the
sandpile model, related to the leverage described in the literature, for
facilitating the investigation of potential risk factors of wildfires. The new
method may be utilized for the development of optimal strategies for prescribed
burning. An R-script for sandpile model simulation is available for further
wildfire investigation.
