Data in support of environmental controls on the characteristics of mean number of forest fires and mean forest area burned (1987-2007) in China

Yu Chang; Zhiliang Zhu; Rencang Bu; Yuehui Li; Yuanman Hu

doi:10.1016/j.dib.2015.07.025

Data in support of environmental controls on the characteristics of mean number of forest fires and mean forest area burned (1987-2007) in China

Data Brief. 2015 Jul 29:4:563-5. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2015.07.025. eCollection 2015 Sep.

Authors

Yu Chang¹, Zhiliang Zhu², Rencang Bu¹, Yuehui Li¹, Yuanman Hu¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Forest and Soil Ecology, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110164, China.
² U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, VA 20192, USA.

Abstract

Fire frequency and size are two important parameters describing fire characteristics. Exploring the spatial variation of fire characteristics and understanding the environmental controls are indispensable to fire prediction and sustainable forest landscape management. To illustrate the spatial variation of forest fire characteristics over China and to quantitatively determine the relative contribution of each of the environmental controls to this variation, forest fire characteristic data (mean number of forest fires and mean burned forest area) and environmental data (climate, land use, vegetation type and topography) at provincial level were derived. These data sets can potentially serve as a foundation for future studies relating to fire risk assessment, carbon emission by forest fires, and the impact of climate change on fire characteristics. This data article contains data related to the research article entitled "Environmental controls on the characteristics of mean number of forest fires and mean forest area burned (1987-2007) in China" by chang et al. [1].