California Fire Data (2016-2020)

Overview

In an effort to provide a more detailed view of the forest fires in the state of California, we have created an interactive map supplemented by graphs detailing the the extent of the fires in the state from 2016 to present day. The interactive map displays icons indicating the location of the fire. When the icons are clicked on, a dropdown box will appear which will contain information showing the county where the fire is located, start and extinguish date, total acres burned, and a direct link to the Cal Fire website page detailing that specific fire. Additionally, users can chose which year's fires they would like to look at by clicking the icon located at the top right of the map.

Data Sets Used

Fire data collected from the Cal Fire API

Tools Used

• Javascript
• MapBox
• Leaflet
• Flask
• Python
• Pandas
• Plotly

Flask Deployment Instructions

• Step 1: Download the Repository
• Step 2: Use the terminal to navigate to the root directory
• Step 3: In terminal, type Python -m flask run
• Step 4: Put the server address into your browser

Visualizations

We created some visualizations to help further show the extent of the fires over the past 5 years. With these visualizations, it was easier to show and compare different year over year trends for fires in California. We were able to use bar graphs to show yearly total acreage burned, acres burned per county, and total fires per county. More data can be showm by hovering over the bars within the graph with your cursor.

Observations from the Data

• There were a large number of fires each year
• When all the years are selected on the map, the map gets cluttered with icons and because difficult to read
• The icons do not differentiate by size of fire; large fires are noted the same as small fires
• Some fires span across multiple counties. The csv reflects this by creating a unique category combining bordering counties; this obscures the the actual number of fires per county
• Causes of the fire are listed in a separate data set
• CAL Fire provided unique I.D.s for each fire which made identification easier

Possible Ideas for the Future

Some possible ideas for the future are to adjust the size of the icons on the map to be bigger or smaller depending on the size of the fire. We could also combine the the data set we used with a different data set that includes the cause of each fire. Another idea would be to include a perimeter outline of each fire on the map. In order to be able to analyze the long term trends of fires in California, we could include more prior years of fire data. Lastly, we could further clean the CSV file we used and to include fire data for each individual county in Califronia.