Wildfires

Map showcase
Data visualization showcase
Chatbot showcase

Inspiration

The devastation of the recent L.A. wildfires inspired us to create a project that assists victims to quickly and safely evacuate. One of the members had close family friends who were personally impacted by the L.A. wildfires, inspiring us to create a website that can be helpful for those who were impacted and for future cases.

What it does

Map visualization: the app utilizes NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) API to extract real-time data about wildfires around the globe. We then used Streamlit to plot them onto a map. Users are able to choose from a country or the entire world and also a time range.

Data visualization: the app uses the same data to portray various line, scatter, and histograms to better inform the user of trends or patterns that may occur within the data. Users are again able to choose from a country or the entire world and also a time range.

Smokey Bot: Smokey Bot is a chatbot powered by OpenAI designed to educate users about the environmental risks of wildfires in a personable, interactive way. The bot is designed to answer user requests about specific pre-made prompts concerning wildfires, answer general questions using generative AI, and create visualizations using real-time data—all in the friendly voice of Smokey the Bear.

How we built it

Map/Data Visualizations: We used the FIRMS API from NASA (as stated above)

Smokey Bot: To create the basic chat-GPT clone, we followed a pre-made tutorial within the Streamlit documentation, creating an API key with OpenAI and using the 3.5-turbo model to power the bot's responses. We then added pre-generated prompts along with their responses, to give the user an idea of the kind of questions the bot was designed to answer. Finally, we added more pre-made prompts that would trigger the other functionality of our website, including creating interactive maps showing wildfire locations and data visualizations showing wildfire statistics.

Challenges we ran into

Our team was excited to challenge ourselves by incorporating tech we had never used before, including unfamiliar frameworks, new API’s, and AI incorporation.

Because it was our first time using Streamlit, we had to adapt to the new framework, including all the syntax and functions that came with it. We also had major difficulties incorporating the two API’s we used during the project, especially OpenAI’s model that powers our chatbot. Despite the challenges we faced with experimenting with new syntax and functions, we pushed through and created a website that we are proud of. We were also unable to meet face-to-face due to schedule conflicts but through hours of Discord calls and constant communication, we were able to make it work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learned a new framework in under 24 hours! This project was something that meant personal to us; we have close family and friends who were deeply affected by the wildfires and we wanted to create a project that both sparks our interest and is relevant/useful in our day-to-day lives.

What's next for Wildfires

We hope that there will be more technological innovations that are created to help victims of wildfires and possibly even advance towards innovations that can help prevent wildfires or the spread of them. Furthermore, projects such as these can raise awareness for local and national politics, which will be able to influence policies and funding to help prevent further natural disasters.