The ABQ BBQ

Each summer, wildfires burn across most of the Western U.S., often coming dangerously-close or overrunning neighborhoods that are on the edges of forests and other wildlands. These border areas are officially referred to as the Wildland Urban Interface. The fires themselves are not identified specifically as the problem, but their annually-closer proximity to humans is. We have selected a particular metro area - Albuquerque New Mexico - to conduct an analysis of the encroachment of the WUI, perhaps with the goal of raising concern for areas most at-risk.

• Where are the areas near the city of Albuquerque that are at high risk for wildfires?
• Where do these high risk areas touch the population, implying that people are in danger in the case of a wildfire?

Thankfully, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) already throughout the country has specialists who travel around before and during fire season in order to identify zones in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), or areas that are wildfire-prone due to fuel buildup, and are also close enough to a residential area to constitute some danger to people.

The first map below shows these zones around Albuquerque (ABQ). Notice how they are almost all situated in foothills of the Cibola National Forest. Remember that the WUIs are not where fires have necessarily happened, but locations where fire potential is high and that are close to the city.

We must take into account that the WUIs in the above map were scouted in the summer of 1990, nearly 20 years before we are now using the data. We know that fuel loading changes over time, and that the trend has been for the last several decades an increase in fuel buildup as suppression is prioritized over prescribed burn management. That said, without re-tracing the WUI in person, there is no way to tell where exactly the border of the WUI exists currently. What we can do is estimate an expansion of the WUI on all borders. Anecdotally, it appears the fuel loading may grow on average about 5 meters per year without mitigation efforts. This amounts to 100 meters over 20 year. We can thus use a buffer around the existing WUI to account for that in the map below:

We've identified where there is possible fire danger near ABQ, but it remains to be determined whether these risk-areas really are near peoples' homes. Thus we've taken zoning data from both the City of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County and shown all plots that are zoned for any type of residential use (single-home, apartment, mobile home, etc.)

We want to find the places where homes do or can exist, and that are also at high-risk for wildfire damage or burnover. We can first merge the two zones (county and city), and then intersect with the buffered WUIs to obtain the following map. Notice, if you zoom around the identified area, the dozens of homes that are at-risk.

Our leading questions were about identifying areas near Albuquerque that are at increased risk of wildfire damage. Hopefully by the last map presented, that question has somewhat of an answer: mostly the narrow strip of the Sandia Foothills east of ABQ. At least that can be the start of further analysis for identifying risk.

First and foremost, it is important that the above identified areas be scouted and sized-up in person for high wildland fire fuel loading going into the next fire season, because the analysis makes implications about the safety of people and their homes. As is mentioned in the literature review and paper that accompany this StoryMap, it often only takes one home igniting to set off a domino-effect that burns and damages an entire neighborhood. This would imply it's imperative to identify at-risk homes on the very edge of the WUI especially.

In terms of further analysis, more research should be done to get a better sense of an accurate buffer for the 20-year old WUI; it could be a lot bigger, or it may have not expanded at all, in which case risk level is lower than anticipated. It is also important to get a sense of the demographics of the people who live in these high-risk areas. This means data on income, race, etc. If the people living in high-risk areas do not have the means to either leave or improve their property for the event of a wildfire, that would be especially harmful. Overall it is important to keep consistent tabs on the homes around the outskirts of city boundaries, because those are often neglected when it comes to assessing risk from natural disasters like wildfires.

ArcGIS online uses the Web Mercator projection as a default, which is convenient for tiling large areas with little server compute time. While distortion occurs closer to the poles and zoomed out, we are observing a regional area small enough and close enough to the equator that this distortion should be a nonissue.