Forest fire risk and endangered species mapping using GIS

The major goal of this project was to find the hotspots or very critical zones of forest fires at various ordinal levels with the help of a few independent variables and to finally find the overall risk to endangered animal species for each county of the state of California.

Georgia Institute of Technology | December 2021

Project for course: Programming for GIS

Guide: Dr. William J Drummond

Analysis: Created a custom tool for ArcGIS Toolbox with Arcpy, Weighted Overlay Analysis (DEM, Aspect, Slope and Land-use)

Poster of the project

Why

Forest fires are a recurring natural disaster event in many states in the United States. However, the most susceptible state is California. Wildfires now grow so huge suppression tactics aren’t working. Climate Change is one of the major reasons why forest fires happen in the first place. This disaster destroys several human lives and biodiversity every year. During the Australian wildfires in 2020, more than 42 million acres burned, and scientists say that nearly three billion animals were killed or displaced. Being a wildlife enthusiast, I do feel that it is very important to foresee such events and prevent them from occurring in the first place or at least be strongly prepared. Hence, I decided to take this topic and create these hotspot maps to provide insights into what regions are at a higher risk of forest fires and observe the overlap of endangered species in these areas.

Map representing the level of wildfire risks to endangered species by counties in California