[The Influences and Implications of Environmental & Ecological Variations on BC’s Forest Fires]
Our project aimed to assess the implications that climate change has had, and will continue to have on our native forests through incidences of wildfire. By analyzing the amount of government spending on wildfire management each year, we are able to deduce the amount of damage each year that wildfires cause. We also analyzed the spatial distribution of wildfires, and their sizes and rates occurrence.
Among our team, we distributed some responsibilities, while retaining others for everyone to get involved in. This proved to be very effective as it both allowed group members to play to thier strengths, while at the same time ensuring that all members were actively involved in the most major aspects of the project; the maps.
It should come as no surprise that throughout the project I gained a large amount of knowledge regarding the nature of BC’s forest fires, along with the strong correlations we identified. Some of the main correlations that struck my interest were; the correlation between major roadways and fire frequency, as well as the links between climate change and forest fire frequency.
We were able to apply a wide variety of the skills learned through our weekly labs while working on the project. I found it especially useful to have developed a fair amount of competency while using ArcMap, and it certainly improved our group’s efficiency and made the start-to-finish project much more straight forward.
By collaborating our skills on ArcMap and working as a team on particular aspects, I learned even more useful features of the software, which proved to be highly applicable on my own section.
We used online drives, such as google docs and dropbox to collaborate our individual work, and keep the entire group knowledgable as to the progress that their group members had made. This once again streamlined the process as it allowed group discussion and viewing of various team members files, without the need to be in the GIS lab, or share files via memory stick.
Nick Hindley Portfolio 