Ethan Nauman

Lab 4 Mini Project

 

Lab 4 Mini Project

 

    For our end of the year mini project we were assigned the task of creating our own question that pertained to a real life scenario. Since my cabin is located in the National Forest in Taylor County, WI, I wanted my question to be centered around that. Taylor County is pretty isolated with a few small towns scattered throughout. With these small towns being located all over, I wanted to know how they would respond to forest fires in the area and in the National Forest. My question was, "I want to create a map to see all the forest fires in Taylor County since the year 2000. These fires had to take place within the national forest, and within 250 meters of a road. I also wanted to see the fires located within a 1 mile radius of the towns in Taylor County". My intended audience at first was just for me. I was curious to see if any fires had occurred recently that were close to my cabin. There wasn't any. Then I thought more, since I was also showing a 1 mile radius of fires by towns, I figured that these fires would be the easiest for these towns and firefighters to respond to. Also, since I was showing the fires in the National Forest that were only 250 meters off of a road, these two would also be easy to put out and not cause a major hazard.

    To answer this question, I had to use two different data sources. The first source I used was ESRI. I was able to use the state outline of Wisconsin and also the county outlines. This allowed me to bring my area of interest down to just Taylor County. The next data source I used was from the Wisconsin DNR geodatabase. I was able to upload the forest fires, cities, roads, and national forest. Without having access to these feature classes from the DNR, this project wouldn't have been able to happen. After completing my map and analyzing it, I have some concerns about the data. One of my major concerns is about the roads feature class from the DNR. What I mean by this is, some of the roads could be logging roads or have very hard access to in the National Forrest. This could mean that although they say there is a road there, is it washed out, does the road not have access to in the winter time, or is this road over grown by forest now. Another data concern that I have is about the cities. I did a 1 mile buffer around the city to show fires inside that 1 mile. Now where is the center of that buffer located, is it at city hall, or what would make more sense in this case would to have the center be located at the fire station.

    I now want to talk about the methods and tools I used to complete this project. Upon getting my area of interest, Taylor County, I next had to bring in all the feature classes that would allow me to show the fires of interest. The first too I used was a buffer. I buffered the roads throughout Taylor county to 250 meters and I also buffered the city to a one mile radius. This would allow me to show fires inside these. The next tool I used was the intersect tool. I intersected the roads buffer and the national forest. This tool combines the two feature classes, while showing the roads and the buffer throughout the national forest. After using the select by attributes tool which I could then show the fires from 2000 to 2009, I used the select by location tool. For the select by location my two inputs were the fires from 2000 and on, and the National forest. This would show the fires in my National Forest roads buffer, and within the 1 mile radius of my towns. The last tool I used was the merge tool. Since I got two different feature classes, one for the fires in the National Forest and one for the fires within the 1 mile radius of the towns, I wanted to combine them and create a single feature class. The merge tool allowed me to do this, and I renamed these fires of interest. Below you can see my data flow model showing all the tools I used throughout the completion of this project. The data flow model will read from right to left. It will read buffer, buffer, intersect, select by location, and merge.

 

    The results of my project show the fires of interest. These fires are located within 250 meters of a road in the National forest, and within a 1 mile radius of the towns in Taylor County. The fires of interest are located by a red dot, cities a bright green dot, and the roads are black. The National Forest is a dark green color, the cities 1 mile radius is in light blue, the national forest roads buffer is in a light green, and the Taylor County roads buffer is in a rose color. I named my project "Fires of Interest in Taylor County, WI" because that was exactly what I was trying to show. I feel that my map makes sense and is easy to read after a quick glance at the legend. I also added a picture of a forest fire just to show the destruction that these can have on a forest if they are not contained and put out. We always here about the gigantic forest fires out on the west coast, I am just glad that we have enough fire departments to be willing to not let these cause major destruction in Taylor County, better yet not to have my cabin catch fire!!

 

    If asked to repeat the project one thing I would change is the cities buffer. A one mile radius isn't very far, I probably would change the radius to at least 5 or 10 miles. This would show more fires of interest on my map. I also would like to find data on how long it would take for the fire departments to arrive on the scene of the fires and how long it would take to put them out. I understand that it would be hard to find this data because I highly doubt that someone has a stopwatch going to time exactly how long these things would take.