Addressing multi-counting issue in Kelp et al. 2026 calculation of encounter rates

Code to address an issue in the calculation of the proportion of area treated with prescribed fire that is subsequently encountered by wildfire in: Kelp, M., Burke, M., Qiu, M., Higuera-Mendieta, I., Liu, T., & Diffenbaugh, N. S. (2025). Effect of Recent Prescribed Burning and Land Management on Wildfire Burn Severity and Smoke Emissions in the Western United States. AGU Advances, 6(3), e2025AV001682. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001682 The original code repeatedly counts the full prescribed‑fire area as “encountered” whenever any of the small wildfire fragments recorded in the FINN dataset (i.e., unique FIREIDs) fall within a buffer of a prescribed fire point. Because a single wildfire event can contain many unique FIREIDs (up to more than 20 per day), this leads to extensive multi‑counting of the same encountered area. As a result, more area is calculated as encountered than actually has been treated. Code is based on the script from "Reply to Kreider et al.: Encounter rate calculation is robust": https://zenodo.org/records/18356055