Lab 6 - Fire Hazard Mapping

In 2009, the Los Angeles County Station Fire ignited in the Angeles National Forest on August 26 and burned until October 16. The total area burned covered 160,577 acres and 209 structures were destroyed, including 89 homes.

To do my own analysis of the Station Fire and surrounding area, I first went to the USGS National Map Seamless Server and downloaded a DEM for the region. Next I went to the U.S. Forest Service website to download vegetation cover data. Lastly, from the Los Angeles County Enterprise GIS website I downloaded a shapefile of the Station Fire's perimeter. Next I loaded all of this data into ArcMap to begin my spatial analysis.

I first used the Surface Analysis tool to create a raster showing hillshade from the DEM. I then made a map of the Station Fire area's elevation and hillshade, also adding in a layer of major roads and highways to help the viewer orient themselves. I had wanted to create a layer showing the slope in percent as I did in the Modeling the Wildland/Urban Interface exercise, however, when I tried the values I got just did not seem right (they were very high), which is why I decided not to include this layer in my final map.

For the second part of my map, I took the vegetation cover shapefile of California and used the editor to clip the shapefile to only show my focus area. Then I converted this feature to a raster, classified by land cover type. To make my third map, I used the table from the Modeling the Wildland/Urban Interface exercise showing the NFPA classes for fuel types to reclassify my land cover raster, creating a new fuel grid. Finally, I used the raster calculator to add the fuel risk to the elevation, making my fourth map of the risk for fire in the area--as the value increases, so does the risk.