Environmental controls on the characteristics of mean number of forest fires and mean forest area burned (1987–2007) in China

• The forest fire characteristics were grouped into five categories over China.
• RDA was utilized to determine the environmental controls on forest fire characteristics.
• de Martonne aridity and forest cover were main controls on forest fire characteristics over China.

Fire size and fire frequency are important indicators of fire characteristics. Characterizing fire size and fire frequency and understanding its environmental controls are indispensable to fire prediction and sustainable forest landscape management. In this paper, we determined the mean number of fires and the mean forest area burned by province to define five distinct patterns of fires across China by cluster analysis for the period 1987–2007. Then, we performed Redundancy Analysis (RDA) to explore factors influencing the spatial variation in the mean number of fires and the mean forest area burned, and to determine their relative contributions to this variation. Results showed that the north part of China generally had low mean number of fires. Percentage of the total number of fires in northeastern, northern and northwestern region to the total number of fires in whole country is 3.49%, 3.18% and 2.19% respectively. Neimenggu and Heilongjiang had larger mean burned forest area with 208,786 and 103,018 ha respectively. RDA analysis showed that the percentage of forest land and de Martonne aridity had significant impacts on the spatial variation in forest fire characteristics over China (p < 0.05). These two variables and their interactions explained 44.9% of the total variance of the mean number of forest fires and mean forest area burned (63%), out of which 8.2% was explained by percentage of forest land, 11.7% by de Martonne aridity and 25.0% by their interactions.