After downloading forest fire data from the Wisconsin DNR I noticed that there were a number of fires which occurred outside of the protected regions of the state. Based on this I decided to ask the following question: In what areas outside of the already protected area of the state should there be increased protection from forest fires based on fire occurrences from 2007 and 2008?
My objectives were to first select only the fire data from 2007 and 2008 and create a buffer of 5 miles surrounding each fire to better determine areas where there needs to be increased fire protection. The results from this project would benefit the Wisconsin DNR to develop more extensive fire protection areas within the state.
Data Sources
In order to answer my study question I needed a variety of data. This included: fire occurrences, fire protection regions, national forest and county forest areas as well as state outline data. I gathered my data from the Wisconsin DNR website where they have all data files they offer to the public. This website I used was: ftp://dnrftp01.wi.gov/geodata/. This data was collected from a reputable source and therefore I was not concerned with the accuracy of the data. However, there was some concerns about the age of the data because it was difficult to determine the age of fire protection region.
Methods
For this lab, I used a variety of tools including: buffer, intersect, erase, union, dissolve and clip. I first started by intersecting the county and national forest datasets to produce one region of fire protection. I then created a new feature layer which selected just the intensive and extensive protection types of fire protection region. I then used the union tool to combine the intensive and extensive protection types to the county and national forest protection areas. Next, I created a new feature layer which selected the 2007 and 2008 fire occurrences from the total occurrence dataset. Once I had the new feature class, I applied a buffer of 5 miles around each of the new data points. After this was done, I erased the fire occurance data points from 2007 and 2008 which were included in the regions of fire protection. Once this was done I was left with only data values which existed outside of fire protected regions in the state. With these regions being buffered they needed to be dissolved so the points appeared continuous. To finish I clipped the data values to make sure that the new regions were all within the state of Wisconsin.
Results
My results from this lab can be seen in the map above. After I ran the model shown in the methods section I produced figure 3 as shown in my final map. This shows the regions in bright green where there should be an increase in fire protection in the state besides those which are already protected.
Evaluation
Overall I enjoyed this project. It provided me with the challenge of not only creating a project of my own but also applying the skills I have learned throughout this course to complete said project. If I were asked to repeat this project I would change the amount of fire occurance data points used. I would increase them from only 2007 and 2008 to maybe 2000 to 2008 for a more complete result. By increasing the number of points taken into consideration I would be able to produce a more complete map of where there should be an increase in the areas which are protected from fires by the Wisconsin DNR. I faced a number of challenges when creating my model because I originally used a spatial join rather than unions.
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