Analysis of 2020 North Complex Fire Impact on CES 4.0 Vulnerability

Authors

• Evan Passalacqua
• Andie McClaine
• Sydney Griscavage

Project Overview

This project explores how wildfire exposure in California affects communities in terms of socioeconomic and environmental vulnerabilities. The project specifically looks at the wake of the North Complex Fire (2020) through CalEnviroScreen census tracts and CalFire perimeter data.

Data Sources

The Fire Perimeter Data Set (CAL FIRE/FRAP obtained) via GeoJSON download URL

The CalEnviroScreen Data set (CalEnviroScreen 4.0) obtained via ArcGIS Feature Server

Computational Environment

• pandas and NumPy for tabular data handling and numerical operations
• GeoPandas for spatial vector data manipulation and analysis
• Shapely for geometric operations and spatial processing
• requests and json for retrieving and parsing web-based geospatial data
• SciPy (scipy.stats) for statistical analyses and correlation testing
• Matplotlib and plotnine (ggplot-style) for static data visualization
• Folium for interactive web-based mapping
• Jupyter notebook workflow

Visualizations:

Interactive Map: https://espm-157.github.io/final-group-evan-andie-sydney-final/

• Figure 1: Interactive Map with fire perimeter for North Complex fire and CES scores for 2020.
• Figure 2: Barplot summarizing the relationships between CES indicators and burned area.
• Figure 3: Bar chart showing mean CES indicator percentiles for burned vs. unburned CES tracts.

Summary of Findings:

The interactive map demonstrates a wide range of CES scores nearest to the fire perimeter in 2021, indicating that communities may have been affected differently. However, the bar plot (Figure 2) provides evidence that there are no statistically significant correlations between CES indicators like unemployment, poverty and asthma. While there is positive correlation between a few factors, there is insufficient evidence to state that certain communities are differentially impacted by the fire in terms of CES scores. Future studies would likely have success exploring a larger range of California through multiple case studies.