A geospatial analysis models optimal evacuation routes for residential structures on Mudge Island, British Columbia, using a GIS-based least cost path methodology. The study, authored by Agness Chisale, integrated terrain slope, landcover, and road proximity into a weighted cost surface to delineate routes to marine evacuation docks. The framework is designed to support data-driven evacuation planning in other remote, wildfire-prone communities.
Use Cases
- Modeling pedestrian evacuation routes based on integrated terrain and landcover cost factors.
- Identifying areas of high evacuation vulnerability based on calculated movement costs.
- Planning the placement of emergency infrastructure like docks based on route analysis.
- Reproducing the weighted cost surface framework for hazard planning in other geographic contexts.
Strengths
- Analysis is spatially explicit and provides a reproducible framework for similar contexts.
- Methodology details are provided, including specific weightings (10%, 30%, 60%) for cost factors.
- Findings highlight specific influential factors, such as road proximity having the greatest influence on routes.
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Row count and specific file formats are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
- The dataset's geographic scope is limited to a single island, Mudge Island.
Provenance
- Source
- Borealis Harvested Dataverse
- Collection Method
- Geographic Information System (GIS) based least cost analysis applied to freely available geospatial data.
- Freshness
- Last updated 2026-05-02 04:11:32; freshness should be verified.
- Geography
- Mudge Island, British Columbia, Canada