Lab Week 4

To create the Fire Hazard Map, I first accessed the DEM and fire station boundaries from the D drive. I then got the vegetation data from the FRAP website, which had fire data for Los Angeles County. I then proceeded to project the DEM raster to the 1983 UTM 11N projection so that the coordinate systems were the same. I furthermore created a slope of the DEM, and reclassified this to match the values given on the tutorial. I also reclassified the data given by the FRAP website for vegetation cover. I reclassified these values based on how much I thought the vegetation cover would burn. Here are the values I gave to each vegetation cover:
Agriculture 2
Herbaceous 6
Desert 4
Barren 3
Hardwood 8
Conifer 9
Shrub 7
Wetland 5
Water 0
Urban 1
I provided the two reclassified map below the final map to illustrate what values I obtained.
Lastly, to get the final map, I used the raster calculator to add the reclassified slope map and the reclassified vegetation cover. I did this to demonstrate why the area of the station fire burned so readily. If you view the map, you can see that the area on the fire map where the station fire was is red. This is because there was a combination of a high slope and a heavily flammable vegetation type. The Station Fire burned and spread so readily because of these combined efforts.
One problem I encountered with this lab was a difficulty is trying to build my slope. First, I forgot to project the DEM raster. Then, once I did this, I was unable to create the slope. The reason for this was because the data was unable to be found by the computer. I had to start over and make sure the computer knew where my data was coming from.