Utah Wildland Fires
While digging through Kaggle for new dashboard data, I found someone had posted data on Utah’s continuing drought. That gave me the idea to look at a potential relationship between the drought and wildfire numbers. Utah has been more diligent in enforcing firework bans lately though, so maybe I wouldn’t find one. Thankfully, the United States government makes their data readily available, so I was able to find all of the data I was looking for. Additionally, I’ve included a link to my GitHub where you can see the SQL code I wrote for this.
This is the main dashboard. As you choose each year, it breaks down the fires on the map of Utah, the number of fires based on cause, whether human, natural, or unknown, and displays the drought ratings for each month of the year. As the drought ratings are a combination of the D0 through D4 ratings, I included the breakdown provided by the United States’ drought monitoring program. Ultimately, we are seeing a reduction in fires per year, but man-made fires still make up the vast majority. And with drought ratings continuing to climb, it will become easier for us to start more wildfires.
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The map worksheet.
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This worksheet uses the same data source as the map page, but breaks down the fires by the cause.
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This worksheet breaks down the D0-D4 drought ratings. As unusual as the ratings system is, I felt it to be more accurate than other charts I've seen that merely display precipitation.
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Originally, I had thought of using a line graph to show all of the drought ratings. It requires less space, but I felt provided no real context like the bar graph version does.
