Frequent and intense anthropogenic fires present meaningful challenges to forest management in the boreal forest of China. Understanding the underlying drivers of human-caused fire occurrence is crucial for making effective and scientifically-based forest fire management plans. In this study, we applied logistic regression (LR) and Random Forests (RF) to identify important biophysical and anthropogenic factors that help to explain the likelihood of anthropogenic fires in the Chinese boreal forest. Results showed that the anthropogenic fires were more likely to occur at areas close to railways and were significantly influenced by forest types. In addition, distance to settlement and distance to road were identified as important predictors for anthropogenic fire occurrence. The model comparison indicated that RF had greater ability than LR to predict forest fires caused by human activity in the Chinese boreal forest. High fire risk zones in the study area were identified based on RF, where we recommend increasing allocation of fire management resources.

Changting has been promoted by the Chinese government as a demonstration for the soil and water conservation works in recent years. As the experience in Changting is now being explored and summarized and will be further promoted to the nation, it is important to understand the factors affecting the vegetation restoration process. Random forest and multiple linear regression approaches were applied to investigate the influential factors and their relative importance on the dynamic change of vegetation coverage of Changting during the period of 2000–2010. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was used to calculate Fractional Vegetation Cover (FVC) dynamics in response to topographic, climatic, infrastructure, and economic factors. The results show that overall, there was a dramatic increase in the FVC of Changting from 2000–2010. The percentage of the FVC-increased area reached 87.86% with an increase rate of 0.142. Factors such as precipitation, temperature, elevation, slope and financial investment for soil conservation were important drivers of local FVC change. Our findings reveal that climatic factors along with the strict implementation of government policies played a role in driving vegetation cover dynamics, and the continuation of implementation of soil erosion management in Changting is required.