Lab 8: Mapping the Station Fire

Wildfires are a seemingly ever-present part of Southern California. In this lab, I'm looking at LA's 2009 Station Fire. The station fire was the biggest fire in modern LA history. Located in the mountains in the center of LA county (see above), it had the potential to be one of the most destructive fires in California history. It was started by an arsonist on August 26, 2009 and wasn't declared 100% contained until October 16 (US Forest Service).

The fire started just north of densely populated urban areas along the 210 freeway. Within the first few days, the fire quickly spread north and fanned out to cover a total of 161,189 acres (US Forest Service). The fire was sandwiched by dense urban areas to the north, south and west. If it would have spread into these areas, it would have cause tremendous amounts of property damage.

In the above map, you can see how firefighters went to great lengths to protect densely populated areas, while letting largely uninhabited wilderness burn. Most of the roads within the fire perimeter are windy mountainous roads. If you look just to the southwest of the fire, you can see a bunch of densely packed local roads, indicating a neighborhood. The fire perimeter follows the outline of the neighborhood, so you can tell that the firefighters spent a lot of resources on building a fire-line to protect those houses.

The theme of the map above is to show roads that were damaged by the station fire. I did an intersect analysis to select the roads that were inside the station fire perimeter and then highlighted them in red. According to the Forest Service, 320 miles of roads were either damaged or destroyed by the fire. This included the famous Angeles Crest Highway, which was closed for over a year until June of 2011 due to roadway damage and land slides resulting from the fire (LA Times).

In the map above, you can also see the spread of the fire over time. Looking carefully, you can see that in some cases firefighters would be able to hold the fire at a road for a certain amount of time. Then, by looking at the next fire perimeter, you can see that the fire jumps the road. The phenomenon is probably due to firefighters have access to the roads, so that where they take a defensive stance. However the strong wind blow would prevail and blow embers, bridging the fire across the road.

By creating a table of all the roads that intersected the fire perimeter, I was able to make a list of all the roads that would have been damaged by the fire. I've copied them below:

ALISO ARRASTRE CTF, ALISO CANYON, ALTA CANYADA, ANGELES CREST, ANGELES FOREST, ARROYO, BARLEY FLATS TRUCK, BIG BRIAR, BIG TUJUNGA CANYON, BLANCHARD CANYON, BOOTLEGGER CANYON, BPL, BRISTOW, BROWN MOUNTAIN TRUCK, BUCK CANYON, CANYON VALE, CANYONSIDE, CASTLE KNOLL, CCC RIDGE, CLEARCREEK TRUCK, DARK CANYON, DARK CANYON MTWY I, DELTA CANYON, DERWOOD, DOSKE, DOTYHILL, EARNSLOW, EBEY HERRERES TRUCK, EL PRIETO, ESCALANTE, FAIRHURST, FERN CANYON, FERN TKTL, FERN TRUCK, FOREST GREEN, FOREST ROUTE 3N32, FOREST ROUTE 4N32, FOREST ROUTE 4N35, FOREST SERVICE ROUTE 3N16, FOREST SERVICE ROUTE 3N19, , FOREST SERVICE ROUTE 3N27, FOREST SERVICE ROUTE 3N90, FOREST SERVICE ROUTE 4N18, GLENEAGLES, GOLD CANYON TRUCK, GOLD CREEK, GOLD CREEK TRUCK, GREENRIDGE, GRIZZLY FLAT, HARTER, HASKELL, HATHAWAY RANCH, HAYNES CANYON, HEFFNER, HIGHRIM, HOPETON, INDIAN CANYON, ISMOND, LA CANADA, LA FOREST, LA PALOMA, LONE GROVE, MANISTEE, MARYHILL, MAURICE, MEADOWVIEW, MENDENHALL RIDGE, MENDENHALL TRUCK, MOODY TRUCK, MOODY TRUCK TR, MOUNT GLEASON, MOUNT LUKENS TKTL, MOUNT LUKENS TRUCK, MOUNT WILSON RED BOX, MOUNTAIN MEADOW, NORMANTON, OCEAN VIEW, ORO VISTA, PACIFICO MOUNTAIN, PACOIMA, PALM, PARSONS, PINE CONE, PINE GLEN, PINE LAWN, POWELL, RIDGE, RIDGE PINE, RINCON RED BOX TRUCK, RISINGHILL, ROCK CASTLE, SANTA CLARA TRUCK, SISTER ELSIE, STAR FALL, STARLIGHT CREST, STATE HWY 2, STONEYVALE, STONYVALE, SWITZER TRUCK, TRAILUNGA, TRUCK, UNNAMED STREET, UPPER TRAIL CANYON, VOGEL FLAT, WATERMAN TRUCk, YERBA BUENA TRUCK

Bibliography:

Bloomekatz, Ari "Fans can't wait to hit the reopened road" LA Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/05/local/la-me-0605-angeles-crest-20110605

US Forest Service Fact Sheet
http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5298487.pdf

UCLA GIS Data
CAMajorHighways: http://gis.ats.ucla.edu//Mapshare/Default.cfm (California, ESRI Data and Maps Street Maps)

UCLA GIS Data
CAMinorHighways: http://gis.ats.ucla.edu//Mapshare/Default.cfm (California, ESRI Data and Maps Street Maps)

Cal Atlas
MajorRoadsTiger: http://www.atlas.ca.gov/download.html#/casil/transportation (Tiger Roads)

USGS Seamless Viewer
http://seamless.usgs.gov/ (NED Data)

Lab 7: Mapping the census

(click to enlarge)

This is a thematic map of percent of Black people per county as of the 2000 census. Darker colors mean a greater concentration (percentage) of Blacks in the county. White means either that the data wasn't available, or that there were no Blacks reported to be living in the county. As you can see, there is a high concentrations of Black people in the south. This is probably due to the fact that after then end of slavery, many Blacks just continued to live in the south. There are also quite a few Blacks in parts of California, but very few in between (especially in the north).

(click to enlarge)

This is a thematic map of percent of Asians per county as of the 2000 census. Again, darker colors mean higher percentage of Asians, with white either meaning that data wasn't available or that no Asians were reported living in the county. As you can see, most Asians live along the coasts, especially in the San Francisco Bay area. There are very few Asians in the interior of the country.

(click to enlarge)

This is a thematic map of percent of people per county who checked "some other" as their race on the 2000 census. Some other is basically everything besides White, Black, Asian, and Pacific Islander. Most people who claimed they were "some other" live in the western part of the US and also small concentrations along the East Coast. The Mid West interestingly, however, has very few "Some other." My best guess as to why is that "some other" is probably consistent of mostly immigrant who immigrated to a coastal area. They have no reason to move to the Mid West, because everyone they know are also probably living on the coast.

Census data provides vast insight into the location, ethnicity, and movement of people around the country. It's nice that the US Census Bureau provides all this data completely for free, so even beginners like us can make beautiful country-wide maps of the population. Looking through the plethora of data the census provides, I thought of tons of different maps I could make using the data. The three above maps are relatively simple, just graphing the population of one ethnicity each, but they still turned out to be very informative.

My overall impression of GIS:

This Intro to GIS class has been very enjoyable for me. I've always been curious about things like map projections and making maps, and I also like working with computers, so this was the perfect class for me. Since I'm an electrical engineering major, I can't take any more GIS classes without minoring in GIS, so now I'm seriously considering going that route. GIS seems like a very powerful and useful tool for almost any industry, so having GIS skills I think will be very useful for me in the future.

Lab 6

For lab 6, we were supposed to download elevation data from the USGS and turn it into four different types of maps. We had the freedom to choose the location we wanted to map. I decided to make a map of part of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. My map goes from the area around Mammoth (in the northwest corner) to Bishop (in the southeast corner). The large valley on the eastern border of the map is the top of the Owens valley. Towards the southwest corner is Lake Thomas Edison, and on the middle of the north edge of the map is Lake Crowley. The Sierra runs diagonally across the southwest half of the map. Mount Morgan is the tallest peak on the map at 13, 758 ft.

The extent information of the area is:

Top: 37.6802777771

Left: -119.151388889

Right: -118.302222222

Bottom: 37.2333333326

The coordinate system used is: GCS North American 1983

This is a shaded relief model of the area. It's comprised of two layers, the bottom layer being a relief map using colors to represent elevation. The top layer is a hill shade map, which is essentially what the area were to look like if there were a sun shining on it creating shadows behind hills and lighting up slopes. In this case, it's as if the sun were above the northwest corner of the map. When these two layers are combined, it makes the terrain pop out so that it's easy to tell what are mountains and what are valleys.

This is a slope map, which shows how steep a slope is at any point. So the green areas are very flat, while the red areas are very steep.

This is an aspect map, which shows which direction a slope faces. For example, all the red on the map is north facing slope.

This is a 3D view of the area from the northwest, created using ArcScene.

Lab 5 — Map Projections

I this weeks lab, we learned hands on about how map projections distort maps. We had to make six different maps using six different projections: two equal-area, two equidistant, and two conformal. We then had to measure the distance between Washington D.C. and Kabul, and show how the distance changes depending on the projection being used.

The earth is a sphere, so to turn it into a flat map it must be projected an distorted into two dimensions. Map projections can preserve angles, area, or distance, but it's not possible for one projection to preserve all three.

Click image to Enlarge

Equidistant map projections preserve distance preserve distances from one or two points or along a line. The Azimuthal Equidistant projection preserves distances from a central point, meaning that the distance from the central point on the map to some other point is proportional to what it is on the ground. The Sinusoidal projection preserves distances along parallels, so all parallels on the map are proportional in length to what they are on the ground. (The Sinusoidal projection also happens to be an equal-area projection as well.) Note that equidistant does not mean distance are equal between every two point, which is why the distances between Kabul and D.C. differ in these two maps.

Click image to Enlarge

On equal-area map projections, areas of the same size on earth are the same size on the map, regardless of where they are located.

Click image to Enlarge

Conformal map projections preserve angles. The Mercator projection was often used in nautical navigation because it represents rhumb lines as straight. This means that a boat could pick a heading on the compass and following that same course make it to where they wanted to go. The Stereographic projection is often used in polar regions because parallels become circles and meridians go out as straight lines from the pole. (Note: the above map is not a polar stereographic projection, instead it is centered at 0º, 0º.)

Seeing the above map projections and knowing what they preserve, it is pretty obvious why map projections are important. For example, while the Mercator projection is very good for navigation, it is horrible for comparing area. Notice how Greenland is about the same as Africa, yet in actuality Africa is many times larger (as you can see on the equal-area projections). So, if someone were to be doing some research that involved comparing areas, it is important that they use equal area maps, or all their data would be thrown off.

The Mercator projection used to often be used as the standard world map, which led people to inaccurately believe that Africa was much smaller than it really was. Since countries near the equator (most of Africa) where projected smaller, people thought they were less important. So a few decades ago there was a big push for people to use maps that more accurately represented size. So clearly map projections are important if they can sway how important people think countries are.

Lab 4

In this lab we had to learn the basics of ArcMap. We learned about displaying map features, adding data to our maps, editing geographic data, working with data tables, selecting specific geographic features, creating graphs, and laying out the final map.

ArcMap is a tremendously complex program with a seemingly steep learning curve. Despite that fact, it's user-interface is surprisingly easy to use and intuitive. I've used Photoshop before, and many of the elements of ArcMap are very similar to Photoshop. This made me feel right at home within ArcMap, and I think made the tutorial a lot easier for me than it would have been for someone who had never used a program like Photoshop.

One feature that kind of trip me up at first, though, was the two different views (data view and layout view) within ArcMap. The whole concept of being able to pan and zoom a data frame within layout view while also being able to pan and zoom the entire layout took a couple minutes for me to wrap my head around. I just had to remember which pan and zoom buttons where which. Once I figure this out, I realized how powerful of a tool ArcMap is in that it can both edit data and layout that data for printing. Another feature that's a little different than photoshop is editing. With ArcMap, you must first turn on editing before your can alter or add data to the map. This provides a layer of protection against accidentally altering something or if you make a mistake while editing.

Another hurdle I had to jump over was actually saving the file. Since I was going between working in the labs and connecting remotely from the dorms, the first time I connected remotely ArcMap didn't find any of the data – instead it just showed red exclamation points. I'm a pretty tech savvy guy, so I figured out that I could show ArcMap where the data was located on my flash drive. I then realized I needed to switch it to relative path names rather than full path names.

This leads me to what I believe is the greatest pitfall of GIS: It's for the tech savvy. As a tech savvy person my self, it's not much of a problem, and this tutorial went very smoothly for me. However, I can see how it could be extremely difficult for someone who doesn't understand how file systems, databases, complex programs, and computers in general work. If something were to go wrong, they might not understand why, so it would be hard for them to avoid in the future. Also, because of the steep learning curve, not anybody could pick up ArcMap and create a map. It's something that really needs to be taught. (This is where neogeography fills the gap of being accessible and easy to use.)

Now, of course, the potential of GIS. In the right (trained) hands, ArcMap has the potential of creating incredibly useful, easy to read, data filled maps. It can be used in many different fields (from public health, resource management, criminology, logistics, marketing, urban planning, etc) to analyze spacial data.

It actually sounds like such a cool field, that now I'm thinking about minoring in GIS.

Lab 3: Santa Barbara hikes and the consequences of neogeography

View Santa Barbara Hikes in a larger map


Potential, pitfalls and consequences of neogeography:
With tools available today, anybody can create decent looking map “mashups” that display user generated content on top of already existing maps. The ease of use of these tools allows anybody to convey geospatial information easily. For example, a college student going on a trip could map out his route and tag photos and videos at different locations he visits. This type of mapping by non-professionals (who know very little about cartography) is known as “neogeography.” Neogeography has the potential to make everyone a geographer.

The greatest thing about neogeography is that anyone can create a map. The largest pitfall with neogeography is, also, that anyone can create a map. Maps made by non-professionals aren’t necessarily going to be accurate, and probably aren’t a reliable source of information. These maps are also very subject to the biases of the person making the map. Since maps are some of the most trusted sources of information, people might be more willing to believe the inaccuracies and biases of these user-generated maps.

Lab Week 2

1) Beverly Hills Quadrangle

2) Canoga Park, Van Nuys, Burbank, Topanga, Hollywood, Venice, Inglewood

3) 1966

4) National Geodetic Vertical Datum of 1929, NAD 27, NAD 83

5) 1:24,000

6) a) 1200m

b) 1.89miles

c) 2.64in

d) 12.5cm

7) 20 Feet

8) a) 34º 4' 20"N, -118º 26' 20"E ; 34.122222 N, -118.488889 E

b) 34º 0' 50"N, -118º 30' 00"E ; 34.013888 N, -118.5 E

c) 34º 7' 10"N, -118º 24' 45"E ; 34.119444 N, -118.4125 E

9) a) 550 ft, 165m

b) 140ft, 40m

c) 700ft, 210m

10) Zone 11

11) 3,763,000m N; 361,500m E

12) 1,000,000 square meters

13)

14) 14º

15) South

16)