jasonrwang / ab-wildfire

Compilation of Alberta Wildfire data from various government sources

Alberta and British Columbia Wildfire Area Statistics Compilation

A quick peek into Alberta and British Columbia's wildfire histories (I started with just Alberta). Take a look at this analysis yourself:

Last modified: 2019-10-29 (or the latest date shown on my GitHub repo)

Preamble

Wildfire season has hit Alberta once again, and my friends and family back home are posting feverously on social media about the orange haze that has hit Alberta. Of course, there's similarly bickering about how much of this is 'normal'. We know that wildfires are intensified by the climate emergency, but there are undoubtedly many more causes.

The purpose of this little notebook is just to answer a question that's been on my mind: how does this wildfire season actually compare to previous years? Surprisingly, this wasn't very easy to find online, so I decided to do some work myself.

Of course this analysis is limited by the quality of data available. I've done my best to double check and, where I could, validate these numbers by cross-referencing them across multiple government-published data sources.

Lastly, I want to thank all the brave lookout staff, firefighters, civil servants, and countless more people on the frontlines fighting the fires. It's a dangerous and incredibly tiring job to deal with such crises. Similarly, my heart goes out to all those displaced by the fires.

2019-06-01: Simon Bridge pointed out to me that I missed a dataset from the Canadian Wildfire Info System Datamart, which I had been looking at, actually has data for all provinces from 1950 to 2016. It's listed under 'National Fire Database fire point data' at the CWFIS site. Thanks Simon.

To Do:

• Look at other factors for fires, like aridity and duration of actual fire season
• Make scripts a bit more robust for next year... how?
• Make plots interactive!

A guide to my logic:

I wrote these files in the following order; it might make sense to read them that way too.

1. AB-Wildfire
2. BC-Wildfire
3. Summary Stats
4. CA-Wildfire

For more reading:

Explained

• Carman, Tara (2017, July 29). Area of B.C. burned by wildfires at a 56-year high. CBC News.
• Tara Carman's GitHub Repo for the above story; this project also partly inspired by Tara's work!
• Nadkarni, Kabir (2018, September 01). Opinion: UCP's climate denial unacceptable in face of worsening wildfire trends. The Gateway.
• McGillivray, Glenn (2019, May 29). Opinion: Climate change is a big factor in Alberta’s wildfires – but not in the way you might think. The Globe and Mail.
• Pierre-Louis, Kendra & Popovich, Nadja (2018, November 27). Climate Change Is Fueling Wildfires Nationwide, New Report Warns. The New York Times.
• Thomson, Graham (2019, May 29). Opinion: Kenney not a climate change denier but a climate change dodger. iPolitics

Academic

• Flannigan, Mike (n.d.). Fire and Climate Change. University of Alberta.
• cffdrs: an R package for the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System. Canada Wildfire.
• (Paywalled) Robinne, F.-N., Parisien, M.-A., & Flannigan, M. (2016). Anthropogenic influence on wildfire activity in Alberta, Canada. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 25(11), 1131.

ab-wildfire's Issues

Measure isn't the same over time

The amount of area destroyed by fire depends on amount of resources allocated. Also, after huge fires there's likely to be better fire preparedness in later years. The y axis should be something like number * severity of wildfires.

Data from 1918

Data from 1918 is available but in scanned form. I've manually digitized the total area data for Alberta and am working on adding them to the visualizations, but there are other useful pieces of information and 9 other provinces (and 3 territories) too! If we can digitize them, I'm sure we can convince NRCan to look over them and post them somewhere (or, maybe we should just politely ask them to do this).

Thanks to @_Magma__ for telling me about this dataset on Twitter.

Help wanted!