7.4 Assignment – conservation and fire risk

This final section of the unit provides you with an opportunity to use the techniques learned into the preceding units. As further ideas for tackling the assignment below, we recommend that you work through this practical handout, which introduces how spatio-temporal data concerning natural hazards can be analysed using space-time data mining techniques in ArcGIS Pro (Note: much the same functionality is also available in ArcGIS Desktop from version 10.3 onwards).

Scenario

This assignment looks at tiger conservation areas in Nepal and the spatio-temporal patterns in the risk to these areas from fire hazard. In this assignment, your task is to investigate the historical relationship between fire occurrence and environmental factors likely to influence its occurrence. You should also examine the impact of fire on tiger habitat from 2000-2013. You should use the tools in ArcGIS spatial analyst to aid your analysis. You may find it helpful to divide the fire data set into separate map layers for different sub-periods, and then for each sub-period look at the pattern of fire relative to tiger habitat and landscape characteristics that could influence its occurrence.

You may wish to further your ArcGIS skillset and explore using the spatial statistics tools given that fire time-series data have been provided, e.g. have fire events become more or less clustered over time? Once you have explored the temporal and spatial characteristics of fire occurrence between 2000 and 2013, you should discuss the implications of your findings for management of the tiger population in relation to fire risk.

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