BC Wildfire Wildland Urban Interface Risk Class

A structure density feature class from the 2017 Wildland Urban Interface project was used as the starting point for this feature class. Only density polygons of class 3 or greater were used. These are 25 or more structures per square kilometer.The structure density polygons were buffered at 2.75km and merged to create polygons where the structure density was greater than or equal to 25 structures per square kilometer. These polygons were spatially joined to a point communities feature class and a community name was transferred to the polygons. Where multiple communities were within the same polygon a priority system based mainly on community size was used to determine a community name. Where no community was within the polygon a near process was run to determine the closest community. Where discrete polygons had the same community name a unique value was appended to the name to make all the names unique.In the densely populated urban areas the polygons were very large and enclosed multiple communities. In these cases a manual process of splitting the polygons was used to create smaller community polygons.The result is a feature class of 546 community polygons with unique names.