This is very interesting but I think there is a bigger context too. My understanding (though I'm not an expert) is that wildfires are a normal, regular, naturally-occurring phenomenon. When humans artificially prevent forest fires from taking their natural course, this causes dead wood to continue building up significantly more, which causes the fires to be much more destructive when they do happen.<p>So if these fires are essentially inevitable, maybe there should be less emphasis on the thing that happened to kick it off and more on preventing the conditions for it to become huge and destructive.
This is a very cool visualization. Weirdly, though, the visually apparent proportion of natural vs. human causes seems to change depending on my zoom level.<p>Plotting this much data presents several challenges. I recently discovered a good guide on the subject of "Plotting Pitfalls" from the Bokeh project:<p><a href="https://bokeh.github.io/datashader-docs/user_guide/1_Plotting_Pitfalls.html" rel="nofollow">https://bokeh.github.io/datashader-docs/user_guide/1_Plottin...</a><p>I think this visualization suffers a bit from "overplotting".
This is a huge amount of data, and an interesting way to visualize. An incredible number of these appear to be started by lightning.<p>A set of filtering tools would be nice - to sort by year and type.
almost all of the land in the Western US that has been encouraged to overgrow is held by a government.<p>the fires on the coast will be nothing compared to the soon-inevitable mega-fire that will reset the Federal land holdings in the Sierra range<p>if more of the Sierra range had been allocated for productive use, we probably would not be in this situation. the Federal government is an absentee landlord