CNPS Fire Followers Explorer

Select Fire
Biodiversity Insights

Please select a fire on the map to begin exploring data

The CNPS Fire Followers Explorer is an interactive application designed to explore plant biodiversity patterns before and after wildfire events in California using data from the CNPS California Fire Followers 2020 iNaturalist project. This tool allows users to visualize and analyze how plant communities respond to fires of different severities and how species composition changes over time.

This application was developed as a joint collaboration between the California Native Plant Society and Avery Hill at the California Academy of Sciences.

Dataset Information & Limitations

Observation Collection Methodology

No systematic sampling beyond general guidance to observe plants in fire scar
Data collection was opportunistic and varied by participant interest and effort

Data Cleanup & Processing

Only Research Grade observations were included in the analysis
Only included observations from 2020 California fires with perimeters > 5000 acres
Observations with obscured coordinates or privacy restrictions were excluded

Key Limitations & Biases

Post-fire sampling effort could be inflated by the targeted campaign
Species detection varies by observer expertise and identification methods
Geographic coverage is uneven across fire scars and regions

Data Sources

Observation data was accessed from the iNaturalist project: California Fire Followers 2020
Fire perimeter data came from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection: Fire Resource Assessment Program
Fire severity data came from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project: MTBS Project Overview

Technical Details

This application was built using R Shiny, an open-source framework for building interactive web applications. It uses DuckDB for efficient data storage and processing, and various spatial libraries for visualization and analysis.

View project on GitHub

Pre-fire vs Post-fire Comparison

MTBS Fire Severity Classes

1 - Unburned to Low: Little or no change from pre-fire conditions
2 - Low: Surface fires with minimal overstory effects
3 - Moderate: Mixture of surface and canopy effects
4 - High: Complete or near complete consumption of vegetation

Data source: Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS)