Lab 4 Mini - Final Project

Introduction

For Lab 4 we were to come up with a simple question and answer it effectively using spatial tools.

My question was this, "Where can the Wisconsin DNR expand its forest fire management area near cities?"

This question entered my brain as I looked over data the DNR has available online. I noticed there was a fire amount of wildfires that occurred outside of the coverage area many of which were near cities. I decided to base my project around fire data in a 10 year period from 1998-2008.

Data Sources

To solve the question I posed I needed a variety of data including fire data, city locations, DNR protection area, county forest, national forest and WI state outline. This data could be found provided by the Wisconsin DNR and ESRI. The data can be found at this web address ftp://dnrftp01.wi.gov/geodata. Even though the data came from the DNR I had a few concerns mostly related to age of data. I was hoping for more up-to-date fire occurrence as the most recent data is from 2008 so I'm missing seven years worth of data. I also am concerned with the DNR protection area data as I could not find the age of the data, their protection area could be very different today if that data is 10 years old.

Methods

To solve my proposed question I used a variety of tools in ArcGIS including, unions, erase, buffer, intersect and clip. I first started by using the union tool on both county and national forest class to give me one Forest Land class. After, I used union again with Forest Land and Intensive and Extensive Protected Fire Area to give me my total protected area class (Figure 1). I made a feature class containing only fire occurrences from 1998-2008 (Figure 2) and used the erase tool on that class along with my protected area class to give me the locations of fire outside of the protection area. I buffered this class and found out which fires had occurred within 10 miles of a Wisconsin city. I intersected my cities with fires and was left with my areas in need of additional protection outside of the DNR's coverage area. For aesthetics I clipped this class so that the buffers stayed within the States outline. The entire process can be found in the model below (Figure 3).

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Results

 

The results from the above steps can be seen below. The map (Figure 4) includes the proposed protection areas outside of the current DNR coverage in relation to the cities of Wisconsin. The proposed areas are within 10 miles of a Wisconsin city and were areas that had experienced issues with wildfires from 1998-2008. This map could be used if the DNR was looking to expand their coverage area and this would give them some justification to do so as there is huge amounts of property to protect near cities and many potential lives at stake.  

Figure 4

Evaluation

 

I'm happy with the result of this project. It allowed me to truly test what I've learned throughout the semester and accomplish something without really following step by step instructions. If I was to do the project over again I might factor some other variables in such as population of county in relation to the number of fires or something a long those lines. As far as challenges go I really only struggled at the end of the process figuring out how to only buffer near the cities which had wildfires in their proximity and not just every city in general but that was an easy problem to fix with a couple of tries.