The Western Forest and Fire Initiative seeks to map stakeholder involvement in wildfire management across the western United States. In recent years, decentralized governance networks have emerged to promote ecological and socioeconomic resilience in rural forest regions. However, the participation and interconnectedness of key actors in these networks remain largely unknown.
This project aims to establish a comprehensive database that identifies key stakeholders and their relationships within wildfire management processes, providing policymakers with better insights into governance networks.
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Collect Data: Gather wildfire-related data from various web sources, including Inciweb and Newsbank, to form a detailed dataset with over 1500 incidents and 250 features.
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Organize Data: Create Python scripts to clean and organize data, developing a relational database linking stakeholders in wildfire management.
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Analyze Relationships: Build a comprehensive social network graph from the database to visualize stakeholder relationships within the wildfire governance process.
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Data Collection from Inciweb:
- Automated a web scraper using BeautifulSoup to extract detailed wildfire incident data.
- Collated information into a comprehensive table with relevant features.
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Data Collection from Newsbank:
- Queried Newsbank for archived articles, news, and social media, providing additional references for the database.
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Named Entity Recognition (NER):
- Leveraged Stanford NER to extract essential keywords for organizations and individuals involved in wildfire incidents.
- Consolidated information into a relational database.
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Comprehensive Database:
- Compiled a detailed database containing data from web sources, social media, newspapers, and articles.
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Network Diagram Development:
- Developing a network diagram to visualize stakeholder relationships.
- This diagram will help identify management networks, reveal potential areas for improvement, and enable further social network analysis of the governance process.