Station Fire Analysis

In the introduction class to GIS I took last quarter, we had an assignment to create a map showing an element of the Station Fire and to write an essay about it. After completing the tutorial and going through the steps with the Station fire data I downloaded from Seamless and FRAP websites, I had a better understanding of the Station fire than I did before. Last quarter I just had a digital elevation model with roads showing what roads were at threat. I had the elevation because I knew that fire spread faster uphill. However, I realized that the slope model is a better representation of where the high and low hazard areas are. By doing this tutorial and assignment I learned a lot and received a lot of help from my classmates.

                After completing the tutorial I began to download the data. I easily downloaded the DEM from the seamless website. However, the vegetation cover was a lot more difficult to find. The seamless data could never find anything and a lot of things were not free. Some data I downloaded did not have the right metadata that I was looking for. After asking around, I downloaded the vegetation cover from the FRAP website (Fire and Resource Assessment Program). I then created a slope by percent model from my DEM I downloaded from seamless. Like from the tutorial I reclassified the slope into 4 categories 1, 2, 3, 4. I later changed these categories to low, moderate, high, and very high. In these categories I classified the ranges of slope by percentage. A high slope percent would be “high” which means that this area of high slope is also ranked “high” in hazardous because fire spreads more quickly when the slope is steeper. Furthermore, I created the vegetation cover map; however I also had to reclassify, like the tutorial. I classified the different categories of land cover into none-very low, low, moderate, high, very high. In the high categories were the vegetation that are dried and burn more easily and the lower categories are the ones that don’t burn at all or are less likely to burn. Lastly, in order to complete the fire hazard map, I combined the slope ad vegetation map to ultimately show the places of high and low vulnerability to fires. I did this just like in the tutorial through the raster calculator. The result was the combination of the two maps showing many of the designated “high” hazard areas inside of where the Station Fire burned.

                In conclusion, the fire hazard map helped me better understand how to create an analysis of fire hazard areas in chaparral covered slopes. Although the tutorial was very descriptive of how to do the assignment, I never fully understood what exactly I was doing and why I was doing it. I did not know why we needed to “reclassify” because the tutorial never said why, I said just to do it. Getting help from my classmates and asking a lot of questions were really how I learned how to create a fire hazard map. I had a lot of difficulty finding the data and it took a lot of my time but it all came together in the end. Also, it was often quite frustrating when the reclassify would not work and I had to redo everything. But I never gave up and a definitely had a positive and productive experience.