Created as part of CJS' Points Unknown Mapping class
This assignment involved experimenting with different ways of classifying data in maps and then selecting one that we felt made the most sense. I decided to use natural breaks for my final map. The code for the other maps I tried, which were visualized in Altair, can be found on GitHub.
These maps were also primarily exploratory — so while I did do research while making and explaining them, they weren't vetted by scientists and shouldn't be interpreted as scientific visualizations.
Burn probability shows the chance that a wildfire will occur in a given point — usually a single grid cell / pixel — in a year. The number is calculated through wildfire simulations, which account for factors like topography, weather and fuel for a fire, such that a burn probability of 0.001 means that the area burned 1 out of 1,000 times in the simulation, according to a 2013 report from the United States Department of Agriculture / Forest Service and the Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System.
This map displays the average burn probability of the single grid cells in each county. These probabilities, which are often small, are communicated in this map as a ratio, as suggested by the 2013 USDA/FS report. A burn probability of 0.001 is 1 burning pixel to 1,000 simulations, or a 1 in 1,000 chance of fire.
Click on a state to view the mean burn probability, or the average annual chance of a fire occurring in a single grid cell in that state. Zoom in to view the annual average burn probabilities at the county-level.
Data source: U.S. Forest Services's Wildfire Risk to Communities project via The Brown Institute. All code is available on GitHub.