Fire

Our map app (web/mobile) provides features like safe navigation to urgent care during the fire outbreak and visualization of fire prediction (estimated from slope, housing, vegetation index).

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Inspiration

We’ve seen deadliest forest fires in recent years, primarily due to climate change.

  • Bush-fire in Australia has burnt over 2 million acres of land and killed 1 billion animals.
  • At least 25% of California's residents i.e. 11 million people live in fire-prone areas.
  • Amazon rain-forest faced a plethora of species loss, affecting indigenous people. These widespread wildfires are very likely in the future within fire-prone landscapes with the worst possible outcome. So, we need a handy and easy map (web/app) application to help rescuer and locals during an emergency.

What it does

The integral part of any map application is visualization and visualization is how we get connected with the context. Ideally, beside visualization of fire outbreak and future fire paths (estimated via slope of the neighborhood, vegetation index, housing blocks, etc.), the app also provides naive but essential functionalities like navigating to nearby urgent care avoiding fire outbreak region, a tool largely missed during recent California forest fire.

How I built it

My team used ArcGIS desktop and ArcGIS online platforms to create visualization and a demo application. Some of the functionalities were implemented by inbuilt Python support.

Challenges I ran into

We really faced difficulties in getting the data as some of the data are huge and not readily available. For the demo, we had to clip the data and as a result of which we also lose some of the potential functionalities.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of the scope of the problem. Being a team comprised of both environmental science and computer science, we wanted to work on idea that touches both aspect of our discipline and we are proud of our idea. Regarding the implementation, we can visualize the map app in both phone and web devices which we are also proud of.

What I learned

We learned a great deal about building “application” from ArcGIS platform. Further, we also learned how to predict future fire from the topographic parameters of the surroundings.

What's next for Fire

Considering the impact of this idea, we are thinking of building this app more formally by inviting some other like-minded developers and launching this as a beta in a near future.

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