This projects explores the relationship between wildfires and drought in the US over the last 30 years using statistical analysis and linear regression in R. It was completed as part of the Data Science & Data Analytics certificate program at UCSC Extension. Further details can be found in the pdf keynote presentation.

The wildfire data used in this project is from the Forest Service Research Data Archive, the drought data is from the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Western Regional Climate Center.

Wildfire data can be downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.5

There are three csv files for drought and region data:

• drought_fig-2_US5SPEI.csv (source)
• CA_5SPEI.csv (source)
• regions.csv