(Spring 2021) This work was created as part of a term-long GIS analysis project for a class entitled Intermediate Spatial Analysis. Project partners included Damian Arnaiz and Aaron Krusniak.
To see an interactive visualization of regional mobility used by this study, click here.
For this project, I used longitudinal mobility data provided by SafeGraph to study the effects of wildfires in the Napa Valley region during the 2019 and 2020 fire seasons, relying on ArcGIS, Python, Tableau, and an online visualization tool called Flowmap.blue to produce mobility analysis results. The 2019 Kincaid Fire was shown to correlate with a temporary outflux in regional population, while the 2020 Glass Fire (occurring in the same region, during the same seasonal period, and of roughly the same intensity as the Kincaid Fire) had no such correlation. However, overall mobility (as well as population) was suppressed in 2020, likely due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, which may have also conflicted with fire evacuation guidelines.
aaron krusniak 