Vesta

History section: Includes wildfire and weather data for given counties, presented as a carousel
Home section: General context about wildfires & climate change
Home banner: Dramatic image with navigation bar
Prediction section: User enters coordinates and app provides wildfire risk assessment based on current & historical data
Prevention section: Smokey the Bear provides 6 everyday tips to prevent forest fires
Community section: Guides and resources for communities most affected by the wildfires

Inspiration

We are three students from Northern California who have been indirectly affected by the catastrophic wildfires that have been ravaging California for the past couple of years. We decided to connect this to climate change because we have personally observed the extreme weather patterns and temperature extremes with the worsening of Northern California wildfires.

What it does

With our single-page web-application, Vesta, we hope to raise awareness about how climate-change induced extreme weather phenomena can lead to intensified wildfire patterns. Key features include:

1) Wildfire History: We provide historical data about wildfires in certain counties since 2015. The app fetches data from the backend to construct line graphs that display the trends in temperature and precipitation levels.

2) Prediction: Users are asked to input their coordinates. In response, the app displays current temperature, wind speeds, and weather conditions by calling the public OpenWeathre API. We then compare current weather conditions to historical data from past fire seasons, in order to provide an assessment of wildfire risk (low, medium, high, nonee) at the current time. Hotter temps, stronger winds, and arid conditions will result in a higher risk assessment

3) Prevention: America’s favorite mascot, Smokey the Bear, raises awareness about everyday tips to prevent future wildfires.

4) Community: We hope to provide resources for those who live in areas that are prone to wildfire damage. In it, we include interviews from people who lived through historically devastating Northern California wildfires.

How we built it

In developing Vesta, we applied the ReactJS framework. For the backend, we constructed a mock server to store data pulled from NOAA csv files, and fetched data from our mock server along with weather data from public APIs using the Axios library. For the frontend, we incorporated React libraries to construct graphs, the carousel, and the form, and all styling was implemented from scratch with HTML & CSS.