Our mission statement
Our project is committed to raising awareness and deepening the understanding of the critical link between income levels and the impact of wildfires across the United States. By providing comprehensive data and analysis, we aim to shed light on how socioeconomic factors influence a community's vulnerability to wildfires, their access to resources, and their capacity to recover. Understanding this correlation is vital to promoting fair disaster response strategies and advocating for policies that support under-resourced communities. Our goal is to inspire informed discussions among individuals, policymakers, and organizations to ensure equitable disaster preparedness, relief, and long-term recovery efforts, regardless of a community’s income level.
Why is this important?
Our name "BanglaByte" is a play on the fact we are Bengali-Americans that love tech! As Bangladeshis, we experience a lot of harm to our environment, and we wanted to bring awareness to the United States.
Summary of Work
We decided to work with NASA's dataset of Wildfire Events and connect it with another dataset of Median Household income in 2023. Using ArcGIS (What NASA uses to map information) to overlap the two maps and find a correlation.
Map of Wildfire Events and Median Income throughout the United States
Results
Based on the results, we were able to determine that in spots with majority wildfire occurrences, the income ranges were bottom-mid tier.
What does this mean?
As more wildfires occur in areas with lower income, there should be an increase of governmental support for those affected.