Lab #6 Fire Hazard Mapping

I underwent many obstacles for this assignment. It all began with my own luck but I will not elaborate on that except for the fact that it is very unwise to work on a Mac laptop with a Windows partition when using ArcGIS for more than cartographic purposes like analyses. My next issue involved the attaining of data. Getting county data, and the Station Fire data was fairly easy, however the vegetation and fuel data was difficult for me because I did not know that many of them were already rasterized, and some did not come with an attribute table. When I would open those files that did not come with attribute tables I would see legends with meaningless numbers next to meaningless colors. I, then, had to go back and search for the best data making sure I do not download the same files again. Obtaining the DEM was most difficult for me. I resorted going to the USGS seamless data website, when I had issues with the Geocommunity Web data (http://data.geocomm.com/catalog/US/61069/2389/index.html). The seamless data website took hours for me to simply zoom in and cut out the area that I needed to download.

Nonetheless, I finally acquired the data no one’s kidding when they say obtaining the data is 90% of the work. Once I got everything I needed, I added the necessary files to my ArcMap document and got to work. With the help of the Spatial Analyst toobar I created a hill shade map out of my DEM file. I did not need to make two copies of my vegetation file as the LA Fire Department website provided both vegetation data and fuel GIS data. The LA Fire Department website also had these two files in raster format so there was no need to convert them. Although I did reclassify both files and I did that with the help of the fire pdf tutorial that was offered on the website and the reclassify option under the spatial analyst drop down box. I took into account that souther California’s climate possesses a Mediterranean climate which promotes great fertility amongst shrubs. That is why they are the most at risk during fire seasons.

Once I reclassified both data, I used the raster calculator and created a final output showing a slope fuel model , followed by adding the Station Fire Perimeters. This will be helpful to the LA County Council when assesssing the regions most at risk and how a potential fire will play out if and when wildfires occur. The cost of this past wildfire during such an economic crisis was detrimental. Certain areas are still not back to where they once were. We must analyze maps such as these, if we would like to save as much as we can against natural disasters.