Lab 6 - Fire Hazard Analysis

In this lab we had to create a fire hazard map for the area around which the station fire broke out last year. The first step was to download all the necessary data from the internet: a data elevation model of the LA county area, land cover/fuel information, and the station fire perimeter. I got the DEM from the streamless website, the land cover info from the forestry website, and the fire perimeter from our old lab in gis 7. Once I had all that I could start with my analysis.
First i created a hillshade layer out of the DEM, not really because i needed it for the analysis, but because it makes the final result look better, and more visually clear. Then I created a slope model out of the DEM. The slope model is necessary, because the steepness of a slope affects how at-risk an area is for fires. The next step was to reclassify the slope categories, so that i didn't have a million unique classes confusing the picture. I decided that five was a good number since it matches with the number of classes for fuel cover.
Next i did a similar procedure on the fuel cover. I reclassified the data according to the standards provided in the tutorial. I looked at the metadata provided along with the land data, which explained what type of land cover each class corresponded to. then i referenced the tutorial to see what new classification they should get.
The final step was to do some raster addition to combine the two reclassified layers into one. The final slope/fuel layer is the one that is really important, because by adding up the data value of each pixel (according to what classes they were in the two base layers), you get a final set of class numbers that are easily identifiable as high or low risk. And when you add in the fire perimeter, you can easily see why the station fire broke out where it did: That area is extremely high risk!
Thus finally it was just a simple step of giving everything appropriate symbology and laying it out in an attractive, professional manner.