Project Iteraration I

Data Story + Visualizations

Overview

Burning Too Close to Home started as a data-driven storytelling project for the Visualizing Data course at The New School in Fall 2021.

Using publicly available wildfire data from CAL FIRE, this phase studied the increasing severity of California wildfires from 2013 to 2021. The project focused on an interactive, map-based visualization that highlighted the twenty most destructive fires each year—defined by total acreage burned—allowing viewers to explore how wildfire size, duration, and geography have worsened over time.

Besides the primary interactive map, the project included a series of supporting visualizations that analyzed California’s most destructive and largest wildfires on record, along with cumulative acreage burned over several decades. These visuals provided a data-driven foundation for understanding wildfire as a systemic and worsening issue rather than just isolated events.

View Iteration I (Medium):
Burning Too Close to Home: California’s War on Wildfires

Methods

    • Public wildfire incident datasets from CAL FIRE

    • Annual records spanning 2013–2021, with historical reference data extending further back for comparative charts

    • Compiled and standardized multi-year datasets with inconsistent formatting

    • Addressed missing and incomplete records

    • Created a filtered dataset of the twenty most destructive fires per year, defined by acreage burned

    • Added latitude and longitude coordinates for geospatial mapping

  • Interactive map of California displaying the top twenty most destructive fires per year

    • Fires represented by triangular markers

    • Marker size scaled to total acres burned

    • Marker color mapped to days until 100% containment (range: 1–814 days)

    • Hover and click interactions reveal fire name, year, ignition location, county, duration, and acreage

    • Custom code used to enable interactivity and dynamic pop-ups

    • Bar charts of the top twenty most destructive wildfires in California history

    • Bar charts of the top twenty largest wildfires by acreage

    • Treemap-style and comparative visuals showing relative fire size by year

    • Pictograph comparing cumulative acres burned across multiple decades, highlighting sharp increases in the past ten years

    • Datawrapper

    • Flourish

    • Excel

    • Medium

Next

Iteration II: Academic Panel