Review Hub for Fire Hydro

[ellenbechtel]

Section by Section

Subheading

• Add USGS full name to subheading

Adrienne says: Post wildfire, burned landscapes respond to rain as though they are covered in plastic wrap . U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) hydrologists are studying what that means for water supply in the Western United States.

• Update the name of Water RESOURCES mission area (oops!)

Adrienne says: Is that connected to the Picture behind the title? If so, I suggest putting that in a corner of the picture above the timeline. And we are the Water RESOURCES Mission Area

Timeline

• Align x-axis label with points on line graph

Sheila says: Near the top, where the line for 1984-2020 is, on my screen where the arrow ends at 2020 is not the end of the graph, so the increase at the end doesn't look as dramatic.

• Annotate with current events as lead-in to general text

• Clarify axis name for the data

Adrienne says: I suggest saying "Area burned by wildfires in the western U.S." instead of USA. Just to be consistent with the rest of the data viz.

Intro Section

• Address date clarification from Adrienne

Adrienne says: The forest west of Boulder was dry. Meager August rainstorms in 2010 had delivered only 25-50% of the typical rainfall. When the Fourmile Canyon Fire started on September 6, 2010, Labor Day, it spread rapidly because of low humidity and high winds. Over 160 homes and 5,700 acres of forest were burned in only four days. Also, does mentioning Labor Day a key thing in this paragraph?

• add sentence about CO WSC

Sheila says: In paragraph starting "Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey..." I'm wondering what you think about adding a sentence like "The USGS Colorado Water Science Center installed two stream gages downstream of the burned area to serve as part of a flood warning system" so that it's not all about WMA? In that same paragraph I don't think Hydrologists should be capitalized.

• Make the time-jump more in context.

Chad says:
I think it was a little odd to start the narrative with information about the 4-mile CO fire from 10-yrs ago, given all the current fires, which prompted this viz. Suggest leading with the section “Wildfires pose a growing risk to our Nation’s water supplies situation” and moving the 4-mile Canyon Fire section to the section currently called “Guidance for Water Providers” and refer to it as a case study to reinforce the nice overview of fire impacts on watersheds that is presented in the other sections.

• start with focus on current year; more lead in from initial timeline to major events in 2020 and relevance for water supply

Deborah:
did not like discussing a 10-year old fire first. Not current. She also suggests reorganizing to focus on this year's fires, with focusing on risk to nation's water supply from fires.

• add general overview of USGS response to wildfires

Mindi says:
is it possible or relevant to add a general section on USGs response to wildfire - maybe some content on gage installation and QW monitoring to start build a story about emergency response capacity similar to what we have with hurricanes, etc...although that may take some engagement with WSCs to get more detail
Deborah says:
Need better link to critical direction of WMA (and USGS in general) - towards modeling and prediction. The Fourmile research is example of what is being done to inform processes, drivers, etc.

• reduce redundant word use of "scientist," "hydrologist," and "researcher" all in the same paragraph

Adrienne says: Do we need to say scientists, researchers, and hydrologists all within a few words. Seems repetitive. Try instead::: Scientists from the USGS responded to the fires right away including hydrologists Sheila Murphy and Brian Ebel. They began work in the burn scar, taking water samples, measuring stream and precipitation patterns, and tracking water quality changes.

• Clarify year and predictiveness

Adrienne says: Usually, afternoon thunderstorms in Colorado are a blessing, bringing cool air, and welcome rains to replenish water supplies. But after the Fourmile Canyon fire, the landscape of the watershed was transformed and local water providers were concerned. Post-wildfire landscapes mean massive loads of sediment and pollutants [could or will be] entering the water supply, which would be very difficult and expensive to treat. The next summer, when the rains arrived in a July 13th storm, the USGS gage at Fourmile Creek captured a timelapse of rapid flooding, and the creek’s discharge skyrocketed sending a 4-foot surge down the creek. Summer thunderstorms in 2011 and 2012 delivered flash floods and choked the streams with ash and sediment, which played a large role in impairing drinking water.

• Capitalize "Fire" after Fourmile Canyon Fire everywhere

• Do typo tweaks and update year

Adrienne says: try The 2020 wildfire season is stark evidence that wildfires are changing the landscape of America. Wildfire size, fire severity, and length of fire season have increased substantially in the western U.S. over the past few decades, and recent massive wildfires demonstrate that the risk extends throughout our Nation. As of October, over 7,000,000 acres (~28,000 km2) of the western U.S.A have been burned by wildfires in 2020, costing nearly $2 billion to suppress.

Pictures

• Point out Deborah Martin and Brian in Intro photos

Sheila says: In the pictures of burned area, if you're going to point me out in the photo, please also point out Brian and Deborah Martin (both also hydrologists; Deborah Martin is emerita). (Ah, now I see Brian in another photo, but that was not readily apparent.

• Review new photo Sheila added

Sheila says: If you want to add a photo that has surface water in it, I added a photo to the Fire Water Viz photo of me measuring stream discharge.)

• Take out mention of hydrologists

Adrienne says: Do we need to call out that Sheila and Brian are hydrologists in the photo? That seems a bit awkward.

Main Map

• Take out forest layer?

Sheila says: I really like the animated map of fires, forests, and watersheds, but I think having both the forest (green) and watersheds (blue) is too hard to see a difference- I suggest removing forest.

• Make map mobile-friendly size

Sheila says: on my screen the map is so big that at first I didn't see the graph below. I wonder if the map should be a bit smaller?

• Add play button

Also, is there a way that you can re-start the animation?

• Add axis label to the x-axis, just for clarity

Adrienne says: Make sure you add "year" at the bottom so people are aware.

• Change bar chart units

In the graph below the map, I noticed that the units are square miles, but the text above discusses acres (with square km in parentheses).

• Give a little more guidance for how to read the map

Chad says: The map animation of fires in the west is nice, but needs some explanation on how to explore it and what the red colors represent that show up as the user pans across the map.

Diagram section

• Edit clouds

Sheila says: Diagram of how wildfire affects watershed looks awesome! I think both diagrams should have clouds, and if possible it should be raining. Clouds are typically flat on the bottom (picky I know!).

• Edit captions and titles

Sheila says: I think the caption should say something about the fact that this shows a watershed during a thunderstorm.

• Make caption font size bigger

Adrienne says: I suggest making the "Watershed before fire" and "Watershed after fire" captions slightly larger.

• Edit text of paragraph

Sheila says: For paragraph starting "After a wildfire burns...", can you change the "Formerly clean" sentence to "Formerly clean, clear streams can become clogged with ash, sediment, and burned materials"? It's a bit over the top to describe them as "clogged" with nutrients and metals. (However, if you feel strongly about it you could add, after "burned materials", a sentence "Nutrient and metal concentrations can increase" and you could link "metal" to our 2020 paper).

Other Case Studies

• Update title of this section

Adrienne says: I'm not quite sold on the title "You know the value of water when the well is dry"

• Mention something about water shortages or groundwater/wells?

Chad says: The section heading “You know the value of water when the well is dry” doesn’t seem to align with the content in that section, since there is no discussion of water shortages from fire nor mention of groundwater/wells.

• Update typos

Adrienne says: use this: Much of the Western U.S. depends on water from forested watersheds, and it’s not just flooding streams that feel the burn. Large reservoirs store runoff, and these reservoirs are vulnerable to fire impacts too. The Buffalo Creek Fire in 1996 and the Hayman Fire in 2002 caused substantial sediment loads into the Strontia Springs reservoir that provides water supply to the city of Denver, Colorado. Denver Water, who operates the reservoir, incurred $26 million in reservoir dredging costs to remove sediment and recover storage.
Adrienne caught: Water supply watersheds in the West will continue to be under fire in the coming decades. Scientists from the USGS Water Resources Mission Area will be working to deliver timely science to understand how severely and for how long wildfire will impact watersheds.

Text

• edit phrasing

Deborah says:
Wording is too casual- e.g., "water providers under fire" and "pick up the slack".
"the value of water until the well is dry" is not a good fit here, confusing

Further Research

• Add Ebel and Moody citations

Sheila says: Under "Further research", this is very Murphy-centric! Can we add some Ebel & Moody papers?

• cite Martin 2016

• link to Steblein USGS fire science bibliography (https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/ofr20191002) and fact sheet (https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/fs20193025)

• Add CO WSC papers linked to in piece

• Add data sources for map layers & timeline data

And also the CO WSC papers linked to above?

[cnell-usgs]

#Round 2 reviews:

Performance

• fix quirky placement of timeline annotation in Safari

Deborah: She viewed the page in Safari, and the page didn't look right in that browser. She tried printing it, and the top and right side get cut off. "Over 8 million acres" does not appear, she had to scroll way to the right.

• do careful page testing on mobile devices (esp IPhones with Safari) and all browsers

• use lazy loading and responsive sizes for all images

Colleen notes: the post-fire diagram image is slightly different (missing an annotation) on smaller size. Also need to go through whole page and apply image best practices to all photos that have been added.

Diagrams

• modify placement of "minimal absorption" annotation on post-fire diagram

Brian says: In the illustration that has the caption "But after a fire, the ground cover, soil properties, and water flow patterns are all different.", I suggest moving the arrow "Minimal Absorption" up to point at the interface between the ash and the soil.

• tweak colors and labels?

Sheila says: The unburned/burned diagram looks awesome! In unburned, why does water have green patches in it? Also, wondering what Ebel, Brian A thinks, should we have NO overland flow in that diagram? In burned, we change "Excess runoff, debris flows" to "Excess runoff, ash and sediment transport" (since we are not talking about debris flows much). What do you think about the ash layer being gray or black (not white), and the water flowing off it contains debris and is gray or blackish (not sure what would look better here).

Text

Comments from Sheila:

• Under Guidance for Water Providers, can you change "Stream habitat alteration, or" to "Stream habitat alteration, and/or" ?
• Under heading "USGS efforts..." I think we could delete this from the first sentence: "through short-term changes in the quantity and quality of resources accessible for use" and add "(both water quality and quantity)."
• I suggest NOT starting a new paragraph with sentence "One focus of NGWOS..."

From Mindi:

• add a small amount of text about WAIEE and IWAAs

I really like the changes, its a cleaner and more direct viz...I do think we've lost one thing though and thats a bit of description of the WAIEE program and its role in research to improve IWAAs. It would be good to add a small amount of text about WAIEE and IWAAs (you can simply reference when introducing water availability), right now it reads as if NGWOS is the only effort and its broader than that.
Chad - I wonder if it is better to reconfigure the last section on efforts to focus on IWS and then the programs?

• edit paragraph margins

Jen says: Text below the map (“However, financial and…”) is displayed in a shorter column width than the other body text blocks.

How wildfires change watersheds

• missing text in first sentence

Adrienne says: The first sentence seems to be cut off?
Brian says: The paragraph starting "trees and other plants use the water to grow and reproduce." seems to be missing something at the start?
Sheila says: Under the section "How wildfires change watersheds", the first line is missing ("Forests, to a hydrologist’s eye, act as both a sponge and a filter. When rain falls on a forest,").

• repetitive wording

Deborah says: Under "How wildfires change watersheds" line 4 "reduces/reduce" is repeated

• Sheila says: In that same paragraph, what do you think of changing "As the water moves through soil and rock, sediment and other chemicals are filtered out." to "The soil and rock also act as a filter, removing contaminants." ?

• In paragraph "Wildfires short-circuit..." I suggest removing "up" from "burns up". And do we need phrase "when the rains arrive" in that sentence? (Sheila)

Adaptation Strategies

• Second line, change "when forecasts suggest" to "when forecasts predict"

• All bullets should start with a verb - so revise to "Plan and install pre-sedimentation basins", "Install real-time monitoring networks"

USGS efforts to improve prediction

• Suggests changing "generating integrated data" to "collecting and integrating data"

Style

lowlighting

Brian says: There is some orange highlighting in places that looks a little off, like underneath "change watersheds". In my browser it's not underlining, but not highlighting either?
Sheila says: Agree with Brian- orange behind words is not quite highlighting, not quite underlining. But I do like the concept.
Colleen says: let's keep the lowlighting but is it the same color as is used throughout or slightly transparent?

Sheila says: I like the golden background at the top. I'm wondering how that would look throughout the webpage, to give it some color?

Area chart timeline

• word annotations on timeline clearly and carefully

Deborah: said that the comment "Over 8 million acres have burned..." is disconnected from the box "Area burned by wildfires in the western U.S." (as in, she wondered 8 million acres of what burned?) Maybe they need to be closer together.
Jen says: If you’re viewing on a desktop, the title and peak label are so far along the edge that you might miss them, or at least not immediately relate them to the graph shape or each other.
Also, in hazards communications, a viewer’s personal relationship to past events can be an important motivator. Without year markings, it’s really hard to make those associations (like, “I had to evacuate from the Thomas Fire in 2017, but I have no idea which peak that might be!”)

• Pull updated fire data prior to release

Sheila says: Re. the graph of acreage burned, has the 2020 number been updated? I'm wondering if it might be even more dramatic now.

• add more reference points for scale

Jen says: The lack of scale makes me wonder… is the lowest point zero? How bad were the years on the left side – it’s so far to visually track and make relational assumptions.

• fix miter limit on chart

Jen says: Also, the orange line is thinning/flattening in areas, and it makes it feel less like a formal graph line and just more like a style element. I don’t know if you can fix this – I’ve seen Illustrator does this sometimes and you can’t get around it unless you outline the stroke, which I’m betting you don’t want to do here.

References

• relabel watershed data source

Sheila says: The map of fire & water supply watersheds looks awesome, and I love the ability to replay the animation! For the sources, can you change "Forested watershed data from..." to "Important water supply watersheds, based on amount of surface water supply generated and withdrawn (index>50) from..." ?

• Cite Martin 2016

Sheila says: I'd really like to add a link to Martin, 2016. That could work in the paragraph that starts "However, financial..." at the end of the second sentence, the words "water supplies."

• provide additional image sources or swap image?

Deborah says: If we keep the Strontia Springs Fire picture, she says it was taken by Moody in 1996 after the Buffalo Creek fire.
Sheila says: Under caption for the third photo, "Wildfire debris..." - Strontia Springs Res is not downstream of Fourmile Canyon Fire. It's downstream of the Buffalo Creek Fire and Hayman fire, and I'm not sure of the date. But do we want 2 pictures of effects from same fire? I"m wondering if we can find something from Arizona, Oregon, etc...

• link to USGS fire science bibliography

• specify that page was developed using certain papers

Deborah and Sheila say: it's important to specifically provide a link to the USGS fire science bibliography; and also perhaps we should specify that the material on this page was developed using certain papers. I think she's totally right about that. Also, this would make me feel better about how Murphy/Ebel-centric the references are when there are plenty of other good USGS papers out there. To solve all these issues, I suggest you change the text:
"For more information about USGS work on wildfires and water supplies, visit Wildland Fire Science, the California Water Science Center, or any of the USGS peer-reviewed research on wildfires, some of which is listed below." to
"This webpage was based on the papers listed below. For more information about USGS work on wildfires and water supplies, visit USGS Wildland Fire Science, USGS Water Resources Mission Area [link to https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/water-quality-after-wildfire?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects], California Water Science Center, or additional USGS peer-reviewed research on wildfires [link to https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/ofr20191002].

• add citations in alphabetical order:

Murphy et al 2020
Murphy et al 2018
Ebel et al 2016
Murphy et al 2015
Ebel et al 2012
Writer & Murphy 2012
Moody & Ebel 2012
Moody 2011

• remove "USGS Data Releases" (the links are embedded in the relevant papers)

From Jen:

• Title: US needs periods “U.S.”

• “Wildfire size, fire severity, and length…” What does severity mean? How hot it burns? How completely it destroys everything in its path? Amount of damage in money or lives displaced?

• “Guidance for Water Providers” I’m not sure “guidance” is the right word here – that usually implies that we’re going to provide some actionable recommendations based on USGS science, but the text that follows is more general (and not directly linked to USGS) than I would expect as “guidance”. Maybe something like “Adapting to the complexity of wildfire impacts”?

• “Fish kills” You might want to say what might cause this potential harm… lack of DO? Mobilized pollutants?

• Adaptation strategies list – I’d like to see a little more explanation on bullets 4 and 6:

Pre-sedimentation basins – what is this?
Real-time monitoring networks – how would this help? The “so what” here is especially important because this is how the USGS can contribute 😉

Guidance

• consider labeling the deposits in the “Guidance” section (especially since you’ve already got a lovely labelling style from the illustrations above).

Jen says: In the Buffalo Creek photo, people probably won’t know what an alluvial fan is, and the stream is a little hard to see.
In the Zaca Fire image, I’m not quite sure what shapes are mountain versus flow deposition. It would help to have it pointed out.
(The Strontia Springs image is fine as is – the debris is clearly debris.)