Abstract. The impact of forest fires on nature and civilisation is conflicting: on one hand, they play an irreplaceable role in the natural regeneration process, but on the other hand, they come within the major natural hazards in many regions. Their frequency-area distributions show power-law behaviour with scaling exponents α in a quite narrow range, relating wildfire research to the theoretical framework of self-organised criticality. Examples of self-organised critical behaviour can be found in computer simulations of simple cellular automaton models. The established self-organised critical Drossel-Schwabl forest fire model is one of the most widespread models in this context. Despite its qualitative agreement with event-size statistics from nature, its applicability is still questioned. Apart from general concerns that the Drossel-Schwabl model apparently oversimplifies the complex nature of forest dynamics, it significantly overestimates the frequency of large fires. We present a modification of the model rules that distinguishes between lightning-induced and man made forest fires and enables a systematic increase of the scaling exponent α by approximately 1/3. In addition, combined simulations using both the original and the modified model rules predict a dependence of the overall event-size distribution on the ratio of lightning induced and man made fires as well as a splitting of their partial distributions. Lightning is identified as the dominant mechanism in the regime of the largest fires. The results are confirmed by the analysis of the Canadian Large Fire Database and suggest that lightning-induced and man made forest fires cannot be treated separately in wildfire modelling, hazard assessment and forest management.