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