California Wildfire Prediction

With climate change, wildfire has become more destructive to personal and property safety. Given the losses and damages, I hope to partner with Google Maps to add a layer of wildfire prediction to the app. Basically, it has two functions, alert, and route planning. For alert, when people use google maps, I want to inform them about the potential wildfire risk of their destinations by date. For route planning, I hope Google can integrate our wildfire prediction feature to their route planning algorithm. In this model, I selected Tehama, Glenn, and Mendocino County in California as our testbed and gathered the data from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. I used geographic data such as land cover, elevation, the nearest campground, as location features, and time-related data such as weather and historic fire incidences as our time features. I used these as inputs to train our model and got the results of predicted wildfire location. Then, I used multiple methods to test the accuracy and generalizability of our model, and provided a cost-benefit analysis for Google Maps developers to review. Ultimately, I would like to deliver wildfire notifications to make travelers safe.