He warned us that not everything within a fire perimeter has burned.
He also pointed out another interesting fact that helped us make this map accurate. Many perimeters taken before 1950 were hand-drawn and are not reliable for analysis, according to Passovoy. The information Passovoy gave us made it possible for us to be transparent about our data, and this project would not have turned out as well as it did without the understanding he gave us about the numbers we were working with.Īn important thing that Passovoy brought up was that, while he considers this database the most complete one of fire after 1950 in California, Cal Fire’s perimeter data from before 1950 is spotty due to the collection methods used at that time. To anyone else embarking on a data project with a dataset of this size, we can’t recommend highly enough that you reach out to the person who compiled the data. Our conversation allowed us to write a thorough disclaimer that gave our audience a comprehensive picture of what data the map represents.
We set aside the time to have an open-ended, in-depth conversation with Passovoy about the data in which he explained things to us that we wouldn’t even have thought to ask about. With these needs in mind, we started working with our data to get it ready.īecause of the size and the naturally incomplete nature of the data, one of the first steps was talking with Cal Fire Data Librarian David Passovoy to learn about what the data does (and does not) include before we started working with it. We also knew that we wanted a slider feature that would allow people to see the growth in fire activity over time. We knew that we wanted the map to have a feature that would allow users to see fire perimeters from individual years, as well as one that would allow users to see all of the recorded perimeters at once. But we found something that came pretty close: A California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention database of many of the wildfires that have burned in the state from 1878 to 2017, containing the footprints of more than 20,000 fires as collected by the state and local agencies that responded to the blazes. Obviously, no dataset can promise to give us every single fire in the state’s history. We also knew that the sheer number of fires we were hoping to document would pose a challenge as we had to work with programs we were less familiar with that could handle a dataset of this size. Taking on a project of this size meant taking time away from our daily tasks, which can be difficult with a small digital team like ours. It was an ambitious plan to say the least. For example, the area around Paradise, where the deadly Camp Fire burned in November, has a long history of fire, including a major blaze just a decade ago.
The goal was to show the fire history of different areas throughout the state, something that emergency agencies use when determining fire risk. From these answers, we had the idea for a historic map of all the wildfires that have been recorded in California history. We had people asking for real-time maps of fires as they burned, as well as for historic maps showing the effect of wildfire on the state over time. From that survey, it was clear that many of our listeners were looking for something very specific from our stories: maps. In October, we opened up an audience survey about our wildfire coverage to learn more about what we were doing well and what we could improve. Wildfires have been at the forefront of our newsroom’s mind this year, as they have been for pretty much any California news outlet.
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