The main objective of this project is to equip students with advanced geospatial intelligence and business‐driven spatial analytics skills by integrating provided wildfire maps with oil and gas pipeline datasets to identify high‑risk segments and their owning companies. Leveraging these insights, students will design targeted customer‑acquisition strategies for pipeline operators—using proximity‑based market segmentation and value‑proposition modeling—to drive proactive stakeholder engagement and market expansion. Students will collect and preprocess GIS data, execute spatial overlays and buffer analyses in QGIS/ArcGIS, automate workflows with Python scripts, and synthesize their findings into annotated risk maps and a concise, stakeholder‑ready assessment report.

Project Outcomes and Deliverables

Students will complete the following tasks and produce these deliverables to meet the project goal:

• Data Preparation
• Acquire and preprocess provided wildfire maps and publicly‑available oil and gas pipeline shapefiles.
• Clean and standardize attribute tables, ensuring coordinate systems match.
• Spatial Analysis
• Perform spatial overlay and buffer analyses in QGIS/ArcGIS to identify pipeline segments within defined proximity thresholds of active fire perimeters.
• Join buffer results to company ownership data to tag each high‑risk segment with its operator.
• Automation & Scripting
• Develop a Python script (or Jupyter Notebook) that automates data ingestion, spatial joins, buffer calculations, and map exports.
• Visualization & Reporting
• Generate annotated static maps (QGIS/ArcGIS) highlighting high‑risk segments, buffer zones, and ownership labels.
• Final Deliverables

1. Comprehensive Analysis Report detailing data sources, methodology, results, insights, and actionable recommendations.
2. GIS Data Package including cleaned shapefiles, project files, and the Python automation script(s).
3. Annotated Map Exports (PDF/PNG) of risk zones with ownership callouts.
4. Interactive Dashboard Prototype with basic filtering and risk‑visualization capabilities.
5. 10–15 Minute Presentation (PowerPoint or PDF) summarizing key findings, maps, and suggested mitigation strategies.