Week 7- Fire Hazard Mapping

Going through the fire hazard mapping tutorial, things were okay. But when I began mapping the Station Fire hazards on my own, I started to run into some challenges. First off, finding some of the data was not easy. The fire perimeters and vegetation data were particularly hard to find. After I found all the data I needed, I began to do work on the mapping. For some reason, the computer was not allowing me to make a slope map from the DEM data, and an error would come up every time I tried. Soon, my computer froze and ArcMap stopped responding entirely. I opened up another ArcMap window on the same computer and began remaking my map.

After it wasn't allowing me to create a slope map again, I tried using other Los Angeles County DEM data, but ArcMap placed the layer far north of the rest of the Los Angeles layers, roughly in the area of Yosemite National Park. I thought that it may have something to do with the coordinate systems being off, so I tried to open ArcCatalog to fix it. ArcCatalog wouldn't open, as a message came up saying I don't have the licensing to run the software. I switched computers to try and get it to work. This time, neither ArcMap or ArcCatalog would open. I switched computers, then switched labs, and then switched computers again, and the programs would not open anywhere. I talked to someone at the front desk and he told me they were doing maintenance on the software and it should be back up shortly.

After a few minutes, it was up and running again, and this time I was able to create the slope map with the original DEM data. In the vegetation data I acquired, there was a field called fuel ranking, indicating the proneness a particular type of vegetation has to catching on fire. The vegetation hazard map is symbolized accordingly. When I began formatting my map, I added one legend per data frame, but I was frustrated that I was adding a lot of the same information over and over, as the fire perimeters, urban area, and highways are symbolized the same on each map. The only things that are different are the different types of hazards and gradients. I then had the idea to activate all of the layers in one data frame, in order to create one large, encompassing legend.