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Data Update 1


1. What dataset will you use for your final report?.

  • My dataset I will be working with for my final report will be for a historical report for the various fire occurrences in British Columbia. The title is called "Fire Incident Locations - Historical", and is from the B.C. Government website.
  • The link to the dataset is provided here.

2. Describe the dataset. What kind of data does it contain?

  • The data included in the folder includes the years of which the fires took place, the sizes of the fires in hectares, the individual locations of each fire as shown by latitude and longitude, and the causes of each fire.
  • I can assume that Ign_Date (Category C) represents the specific time when the fire takes place. For example, Fire K61192 has 20030821121200 as its number in Category C. When this number is separated by date and time, it can be simplified to 2003/08/21, 12:12. The Fire Label (Category E) is simply a combination of the fire's year followed by its number.

3. Is there anything about your data that you don’t understand? (i.e. what a column heading means). How will you find this out? 

  • What I find confusing are what defines a Fire Center (Category F), a Zone (Category G), and a Fire Type (Category I). However, these three terms I believe can be cleared up for me with a simple Google search.
  • The only categories which I believe would require more in-depth research to would have to be the Fire Number (Category A), FCODE (Category N), OBJECTID (Category O), and the X and Y readings (Categories Q and R).

4. What are some questions you hope to answer with your data? List at least three. (you don’t need the answers at this point) 

  • Which year had the worst fires according to number and size?
  • What appears to be the leading cause of most wildfires?
  • Where are the majority of fires taking place?
  • Are there any anomalies in the data that can be pinpointed to specific events at that time (i.e.: Chemical fires, unusually large fires, fires occurring during the wintertime)?

Comments

  1. Claudia CulleyOctober 12, 2021 at 3:02 PM

    Hi Kyron! I think you've picked out a great data set to work with. The topic is timely as BC experienced an alarming amount of forest fires this past summer. I also think you have listed an interesting set of questions that can be answered from the data. However, I believe the last question may need some help from external resources to be answered. It could also be interesting to look at forest fire records from a different province and see how those compare to that of BC. Great job overall and I'm looking forward to seeing your Update 2!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kyron BeatonOctober 13, 2021 at 7:06 PM

    Dataset has been updated to include a Google Spreadsheet link to the data, as the original file is inaccessible.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Trisha MesinaOctober 16, 2021 at 4:31 PM

    I think your blog is very well written and easy to understand. You have done a good job at explaining what your data is all about. I do agree and find some of the column headings a little bit confusing, but you seem to have a good idea of how you are going to figure those out. I think you have great starting questions for this update. I am curious if you are going to be using all of this data? Or will you be narrowing down and focus only on the last decade or two? Asking because the file is rather large and has information all the way from 1950--which may be interesting to see if the overall rate of fires have gone down or up since then, but narrowing down may be a good idea.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Andrew YenOctober 19, 2021 at 4:28 AM

    Hey Kyron, I think that the dataset that you chose is really interesting. It will be interesting to see patterns of when and where fires occur. I do agree that the categories of fires may be slightly confusing to people that are not career firefighters. It will be interesting to see you figure that stuff out for your update number 2. I think you should limit the amount of time for your analysis. Maybe analyze the last 3-5 years of the data, or however many years you feel is fit since there is a lot here and it would be tiring to go through all of it. Very good overall, though.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Jessica MarohnOctober 19, 2021 at 9:49 AM

    Hi Kyron. Wildfires are definitely a current topic of interest. It will be really interesting to see what the results are of your project. I like that you are looking to identify any anomalies in the data and look forward to seeing what you come up with. I would caution as well though that you may want to minimize the range or group the years into ranges.

    ReplyDelete

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