It was not discovered until after the project began that there was a 2013 ruling by the Supreme Court which decreed that all Californian GIS data shall be entirely free of charge and available to the general public without hindrance. While this is beneficial for the project, it is important not to leap to conclusions. There is a likelihood that more secretive data is still kept hidden from the public, not helped by a notion on all the available files that the authors are not responsible for the accuracy of the data offered. Despite this, most of it is standard practice and is less likely to happen with natural disaster data compared to other GIS applications like crime and terrorism.

Most of the data came from the Californian government portals, the ULCA public library database, and other universities. A few more were taken from the ESRI ArcGIS Open Source.

 

Primary Data	Purpose
Open Street Map	Basemap reference for neighboring states and water features around California.
California State Polygon	Basic state polygon used to determine general outline of the state and for clipping features. Does not account for the San Francisco Bay or Lake Tahoe.
Cities	A point shapefile denoting every registered city in the state, including those incorporated into a bigger metropolitan area (LA).
Fire hazard points	Point shapefile denoting areas of fire hotpots throughout the Great Basin
Fire stations	Point shapefile denoting every fire response stations in the state, all-inclusive to public/private/state/federal ownership, large-small scale.
Fire occurrence and likelihood historical data	Feature dataset displaying likelihood of fire based off of historical data indexed into 3 caterogies (moderate – very high)
CES3 Variable Shapefile	Multi-purpose feature dataset containing 25+ variables of the state. I chose the following six in accordance to the potential relevancy of those to wildfire and how the variables may impact health
Population
Pollution
PM 2.5
Toxicity
Asthma
Cardiovascular