Data 271 Project - California Wildfire EDA

Presentation Year

2026

College or Department

College of Natural Resources & Sciences

Short Description of your Research or Creative Project (700 characters or less)

This project merges CAL FIRE Historical Fire Perimeters (22,810 records) with a Kaggle incident dataset (1,636 records) to analyze California wildfire impact from 2013 to 2019. Cleaning involved dropping sparse columns, filling resource NaNs with zero, converting date strings to datetime, and normalizing fire names by uppercasing and stripping suffixes to build a shared merge key. After filtering to California and deduplicating by largest perimeter per name and year, an inner join yielded 810 matched fires. Engineered columns include fire size class, mapped cause labels, and duration in days. Grouped aggregations and faceted plots show severity outweighs frequency and that powerline ignitions drive disproportionate structural loss.

Does your project align with any of the following?

Permission to Publish Work

Yes

Presentation File Upload

mathematics-data-science-trevino-odell-colin-203161-3x2.pdf (6.4 KB)

Primary Contact: First Name

Colin

Primary Contact: Last Name

Trevino-Odell

Primary Contact: Email

cmt41@humboldt.edu

Primary Contact: I am a

Undergraduate Student

Primary Contact: Phone Number

3123950609

Indicate File Dimensions

3'x2'