Understanding the impacts of wildland fires on ecosystem habitats using geospatial analysis

Keywords: wildland fires, local habitats, hotspots, clustering, dispersion, forest canopy, Geospatial Relationship, Global Moran
Abstract Type: Virtual Poster Abstract

Abstract

Natural meteorological and climatological events such as wildland fires have been common occurrences all over the world and are starting to become more frequent especially over areas that have experienced frequent drought conditions influencing moisture conditions of tree canopy which can be susceptible to fire conditions. Numerous projects have been designed to evaluate these fire hazards and risks of local habitats alone. In this experiment, the primary focus will be within Central California focusing on parts of the remote areas of the Anthony Chabot National Forest and the Sierra National parks. For the purposes of this investigation, VIRRS will be used to assess the weather properties of these fire sensors designed to detect the impacts on various tree canopy. The components to VIRRS are Suomi NPP and NOAA-20. The geospatial analysis of the fire sensor points was processed onto the platforms of the ArcMap 10.8 plotted on the workspace of the world imagery map. Topology assessments were used to model the various types of maps correlated to the impacts of these ecosystems. Different mapping layers consisting of the surveyed areas as well as the forested and non-forested areas were designed to assess the geographical distribution of these fire sensors. The method for this research comprises a series of points plotted from these remote sensing applications. These applications are used to model the spatial distribution of these points with most falling within the spatial randomness and clustering categories correlating to cold spot and hot spot analysis where most impacts occurred.