The Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) is the area where houses meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland vegetation. This makes the WUI a focal area for human-environment conflicts such as wildland fires, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and biodiversity decline. Using geographic information systems (GIS), we integrated U.S. Census and USGS National Land Cover Data, to map the Federal Register definition of WUI (Federal Register 66:751, 2001) for the conterminous United States from 1990-2020. These data are useful within a GIS for mapping and analysis at national, state, and local levels. Data are available as a geodatabase and include information such as housing densities for 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020; wildland vegetation percentages for 1992, 2001, 2011, and 2019; as well as WUI classes in 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020.This WUI feature class is separate from the WUI datasets maintained by individual forest unites, and it is not the authoritative source data of WUI for forest units. This dataset shows change over time in the WUI data up to 2020.Metadata and Downloads

Downloads and additional Metadata. A tiled map service depicting wildland urban interface data for 2010. The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the area where houses meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland vegetation. This makes the WUI a focal area for human-environment conflicts such as wildland fires, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and biodiversity decline. Using geographic information systems (GIS), we integrated U.S. Census and USGS National Land Cover Data, to map the Federal Register definition of WUI (Federal Register 66:751, 2001) for the conterminous United States for 2010. These data are useful within a GIS for mapping and analysis at national, state, and local levels. Data are available as a feature class and include information such as housing and population densities for 2010; wildland vegetation percentages for 2011; as well as WUI class in 2010. This WUI feature class is separate from the WUI datasets maintained by individual forest units, and it is not the authoritative source data of WUI for forest units. This map service shows the WUI data for 2010 only.

Downloads and additional Metadata. A tiled map service depicting wildland urban interface data for 2000. The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the area where houses meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland vegetation. This makes the WUI a focal area for human-environment conflicts such as wildland fires, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and biodiversity decline. Using geographic information systems (GIS), we integrated U.S. Census and USGS National Land Cover Data, to map the Federal Register definition of WUI (Federal Register 66:751, 2001) for the conterminous United States for 2000. These data are useful within a GIS for mapping and analysis at national, state, and local levels. Data are available as a feature class and include information such as housing and population densities for 2000; wildland vegetation percentages for 2001; as well as WUI class in 2000. This WUI feature class is separate from the WUI datasets maintained by individual forest units, and it is not the authoritative source data of WUI for forest units. This map service shows the WUI data for 2000 only.This record was taken from the USDA Enterprise Data Inventory that feeds into the https://data.gov catalog. Data for this record includes the following resources: ISO-19139 metadata ArcGIS Hub Dataset ArcGIS GeoService For complete information, please visit https://data.gov.

The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the area where urban development occurs in close proximity to wildland vegetation. We generated WUI maps for the conterminous U.S. using building point locations (Carlson et al. 2022), offering higher spatial resolution compared to previously developed WUI maps based on U.S. Census Bureau housing density data (Radeloff et al., 2017). Building point locations were obtained from a Microsoft product released in 2018, which classified building footprints based on high-resolution satellite imagery. Maps were also based on wildland vegetation mapped by the 2016 National Land Cover Dataset (Yang et al., 2018). The mapping algorithm utilized definitions of the WUI from the U.S. Federal Register (USDA & USDI, 2001) and Radeloff et al. (2005). According to these definitions, two classes of WUI were identified: 1) the intermix, where there is at least 50% vegetation cover surrounding buildings, and 2) the interface, where buildings are within 2.4 km ...

ORS 477.490 requires Oregon Sate University (OSU) and the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) to develop a statewide wildland-urban interface (WUI) map that will be used in conjunction with the statewide wildfire hazard map (ORS 477.490) by the Oregon State Fire Marshal to determine on which properties defensible space standards apply (ORS 476.392) and by the Building Codes Division to determine to which structures home hardening building codes apply (ORS 455.612).Rules directing development of the WUI are listed in OAR-629-044-1011 and 629-044-1016. A comprehensive description of datasets and geospatial processing is available at https://hazardmap.forestry.oregonstate.edu/understand-map. The official statewide WUI map is available on the Oregon Wildfire Risk Explorer at https://tools.oregonexplorer.info/viewer/wildfire.Following is an overview of the data and methods used develop the statewide WUI map.Wildland-Urban InterfaceCreating a statewide map of the WUI involved two general steps. First, we determined which parts of Oregon met the minimum building density requirements to be classified as WUI. Second, for those areas that met the minimum building density threshold, we evaluated the amount and proximity of wildland or vegetative fuels. Following is a summary of geospatial tasks used to create the WUI.Develop a potential WUI map of all areas that meet the minimum density of structures and other human development - According to OAR 629-044-1011, the boundary of Oregon’s WUI is defined in part as areas with a minimum building density of one building per 40 acres, the same threshold defined in the federal register (Executive Order 13728, 2016), and any area within an Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) regardless of the building density. Step One characterizes all the locations in Oregon that could be considered for inclusion in the WUI on building density and UGB extent alone. The result of Step One was a map of potential WUI which was then further refined into final WUI map based on fuels density and proximity in Step Two.

Due to the mixed distribution of buildings and vegetation, wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas are characterized by complex fuel distributions and geographical environments. The behavior of wildfires occurring in the WUI often leads to severe hazards and significant damage to man-made structures. Therefore, WUI areas warrant more attention during the wildfire season. Due to the ever-changing dynamic nature of California’s population and housing, the update frequency and resolution of WUI maps that are currently used can no longer meet the needs and challenges of wildfire management and resource allocation for suppression and mitigation efforts. Recent developments in remote sensing technology and data analysis algorithms pose new opportunities for improving WUI mapping methods. WUI areas in California were directly mapped using building footprints extracted from remote sensing data by Microsoft along with the fuel vegetation cover from the LANDFIRE dataset in this study. To accommodate...

The Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) is the area where houses and natural vegetation meet or intermingle. WUI areas are exposed to an increased hazard of wildfires and have significantly expanded worldwide in the past few decades. In this study, we developed a new empirical approach for mapping the WUI by generating a WUI index based on the juxtaposition among buildings, vegetation, and the fire history of the study area. We first calculated the percentage coverage of buildings and three different fuel typologies within circular moving windows with radii of 100, 250, and 500 m, and then acquired the fire history data between 2012 and 2021 for Israel and the West Bank (Palestinian Authority) from the VIIRS active fires remote sensing product. We defined the WUI as cells where the combination of vegetation cover and building cover had more VIIRS fire detections than expected by chance. To assess the effects of using broad vs. local scale parameterizations on resulting WUI maps, we repeated this process twice, first using national-scale data, and then separately in four distinct geographic regions. We assessed the congruence in the amounts and patterns of WUI in regions as mapped by information from these two analysis scales. We found that the WUI in Israel and the West Bank ranged from 0.5% to 1.7%, depending on fuel type and moving window radius. The scale of parameterization (national vs. regional) affected the WUI patterns only in one of the regions, whose characteristics differed markedly than the rest of the country. Our new method differs from existing WUI mapping methods as it is empirical and geographically flexible. These two traits allow it to robustly map the WUI in other countries with different settlement, fuel, climate and wildfire characteristics.

Maps of California's Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) generated using the Time Step Moving Window (TSMW) method outlined in the paper "Remapping California's Wildland Urban Interface: A Property-Level Time-Space Framework, 2000-2020".

WUI maps were generated using Zillow ZTRAX parcel level attributes joined with FEMA USA Structures building footprints and the National Land Cover Database (NLCD).

All files are geotiff rasters with WUI areas mapped at a ~30m resolution. A raster value of null indicates not WUI, raster value of 1 indicates intermix WUI, and a raster value of 2 indicates interface WUI.

Three WUI maps were generated using structures built on of before the years indicated below:

2000 - "CA_WUI_2000.tif"

2010 - "CA_WUI_2010.tif"

2020 - "CA_WUI_2020.tif"

Acknowledgments -

We gratefully acknowledge access to the Zillow Transaction and Assessment Dataset (ZTRAX) through a data use agreement between the University of Colorado Boulder and Zillow Group, Inc. More information on accessing the data can be found at http://www.zillow.com/ztrax. We thank Johannes Uhl and Stefan Leyk for the incredible amount of work they dedicated to preparing this Zillow ZTRAX. Funding for our work has been provided by Arizona State University's Institute of Social Science Research (ISSR) Seed Grant Initiative. Additional funding was was provided through the Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment program of the National Science Foundation, Award Number 1924670 to the University of Colorado Boulder, the Institute of Behavioral Science, Earth Lab, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the Grand Challenge Initiative and the Innovative Seed Grant program at the University of Colorado Boulder as well as the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Numbers R21 HD098717 01A1 and P2CHD066613.

Jackson County Community Fire Plan Map 5 showing the Wildland Urban Interface and Public Lands. The map document is 11 inches by 17 inches.

Maps of California's Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) generated using the Time Step Moving Window (TSMW) method outlined in the paper "Remapping California's Wildland Urban Interface: A Property-Level Time-Space Framework, 2000-2020".

Please cite the original paper:

Berg, Aleksander K, Dylan S. Connor, Peter Kedron, and Amy E. Frazier. 2024. “Remapping California’s Wildland Urban Interface: A Property-Level Time-Space Framework, 2000–2020.” Applied Geography 167 (June): 103271. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2024.103271.

WUI maps were generated using Zillow ZTRAX parcel level attributes joined with FEMA USA Structures building footprints and the National Land Cover Database (NLCD).

All files are geotiff rasters with WUI areas mapped at a ~30m resolution. A raster value of null indicates not WUI, raster value of 1 indicates intermix WUI, and a raster value of 2 indicates interface WUI.

Three WUI maps were generated using structures built on of before the years indicated below:

2000 - "CA_WUI_2000.tif"

2010 - "CA_WUI_2010.tif"

2020 - "CA_WUI_2020.tif"

Acknowledgments -

We thank our reviewers and editors for helping us to improve the manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge access to the Zillow Transaction and Assessment Dataset (ZTRAX) through a data use agreement between the University of Colorado Boulder, Arizona State University, and Zillow Group, Inc. More information on accessing the data can be found at http://www.zillow.com/ztrax. The results and opinions are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the position of Zillow Group. Support by Zillow Group Inc. is acknowledged. We thank Johannes Uhl and Stefan Leyk for their great work in preparing the original dataset. For feedback and comments, we also thank Billie Lee Turner II, Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen, and participants at the 2022 Global Conference on Economic Geography, the 2022 Young Economic Geographers Network meeting, and the 2023 annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers. Funding for our work has been provided by Arizona State University's Institute of Social Science Research (ISSR) Seed Grant Initiative. Additional funding was provided through the Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment program of the National Science Foundation, Award Number 1924670 to the University of Colorado Boulder, the Institute of Behavioral Science, Earth Lab, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the Grand Challenge Initiative and the Innovative Seed Grant program at the University of Colorado Boulder as well as the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Numbers R21 HD098717 01A1 and P2CHD066613.

This map features a Wildland-Urban Interface layer for the United States that shows areas that may be at higher risk of wildfires and other issues affecting nature. Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) land has been defined as the zone where natural areas and human development meet.WUI land has been growing over several decades as populations grow and migrate with more housing being developed in and near public lands and other natural areas. This map includes a few layers of information related to WUI land and a presentation that highlights some of the issues it raises, such as the risk of wildfires affecting housing communities.The map features information from a variety of sources, including the USDA Forest Service, Forest Health Technology Enterprise Team (FHTET), and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The map is suitable for regional display and analysis at about 1:1m scale.

This dataset provides global wildland-urban interface (WUI) maps at a spatial resolution of 30 meters for the years 2000, 2010, and 2020. The WUI is defined as areas where the 200-meter buffers of urban areas (characterized by artificial surfaces) intersect with the 400-meter buffers of wildland areas, including forests, shrublands, and grasslands. These maps are produced based on land cover classification results from the GlobeLand30 datasets.

Projection Information:The projection information aligns with GlobeLand30 standards:

Projection: UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator) for latitudes from S85 to N85, using a 6-degree zone system without zone numbers.

Polar Azimuthal Projection: Applicable for latitudes from S85 to N90 and N85 to N90, with the projection surface intersecting at the South and North Poles.

Naming Convention:The file naming convention is as follows:

WUI_LHH_VV_YYYYlc030.tif

Where:

L = Latitude code (N for the Northern Hemisphere, S for the Southern Hemisphere)

HH = Number of UTM zone

VV = Starting latitude of the tile (each tile crosses 5° latitude)

YYYY = Year mapped

lc = Land cover abbreviation

030 = Spatial resolution of 30 meters

Example File Name:For instance, the file named WUI_n15_45_2020lc030.tif can be interpreted as follows:

WUI: Wildland-Urban Interface dataset

n: Northern latitude

15: UTM zone 15

45: Starting latitude of 45 degrees

2020: Product year of 2020

lc: Land cover classification

030: Spatial resolution of 30 meters

The Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) is the area where houses meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland vegetation. This makes the WUI a focal area for human-environment conflicts such as wildland fires, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and biodiversity decline. Using geographic information systems (GIS), we integrated U.S. Census and USGS National Land Cover Data, to map the Federal Register definition of WUI (Federal Register 66:751, 2001) for the conterminous United States from 1990-2020. These data are useful within a GIS for mapping and analysis at national, state, and local levels. Data are available as a geodatabase and include information such as housing densities for 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020; wildland vegetation percentages for 1992, 2001, 2011, and 2019; as well as WUI classes in 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020.To provide a spatially detailed national assessment of the wildland-urban interface (WUI) and WUI change between 1990 and 2020 across the coterminous U.S. to support wildland fire research, policy and management, and inquiries into the effects of housing growth on the environment.This data publication, published on 08/09/2023 is a fourth edition. The first edition (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2015-0012) contained data representing the 2010 WUI of the conterminous United States. The second edition (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2015-0012-2) contained data that represented the 1990-2010 WUI. The third edition (https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2015-0012-3) contains data that represent the 1990-2020 WUI.

This fourth edition uses an improved PLA housing density dataset to classify WUI from 1990-2020. This involved updating the public land adjustment (PLA) process (step 1) by correcting topological errors and removing erroneous sliver polygons generated during the PLA process.

On 09/16/2024, minor metadata updates were made, which included updating URLs for associated articles.

Information about WUI can also be found here: http://silvis.forest.wisc.edu/data/wui-change as well as https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/nrs/projects/wuigrowth.

This map features a Wildland-Urban Interface layer for the United States that shows areas that may be at higher risk of wildfires and other issues affecting nature. Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) land has been defined as the zone where natural areas and human development meet.WUI land has been growing over several decades as populations grow and migrate with more housing being developed in and near public lands and other natural areas. This map includes a few layers of information related to WUI land and a presentation that highlights some of the issues it raises, such as the risk of wildfires affecting housing communities.The map features information from a variety of sources, including the USDA Forest Service, Forest Health Technology Enterprise Team (FHTET), and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The map is suitable for regional display and analysis at about 1:1m scale.

The expansion of the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) highlights the critical need for precise mapping to improve wildfire risk management. A key challenge, however, is the scarcity of high-resolution, nationwide building footprint data. To bridge this gap, we developed a semi-automated, multi-criteria filtering framework designed to enhance the quality of open-source global building datasets—specifically Microsoft’s Global Building Footprints (MSB)—for mainland Portugal.

Our methodology combines regional adaptability with spatial analysis techniques, including area-based thresholds and proximity rules, using Portugal’s official Building Geographic Location Database (BGE) as a reference. To optimize residential representation, the framework iteratively removes non-residential outliers (e.g., industrial facilities, solar farms, transmission infrastructure) through dynamically adjusted thresholds applied across administrative levels (municipalities and NUTS-2 regions). As a result, the filtering process reduced the original dataset from approximately 5.6 million to 3.0 million building footprints.

This dataset provides WUI maps for Mainland Portugal, generated using Microsoft’s Global Building Footprints. The geodatabase include WUI maps, original building footprints, and filtered versions for analysis.

Our WUI maps are composed of 11 classes:

Classification of WUI types:

1 - Intermix

2 - Interface

Classification of building density in non-WUI areas:

3 - Very Low

4 - Low

5 - Medium

6 - High

Classification of Land Cover:

200 - Agriculture

300 - Forest

400 - Shrubland

500 - Without Vegetation

600 - Water

Wildland-urban interface (WUI) maps identify areas with wildfire risk, but they are often outdated due to the lack of building data. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can extract building locations from remote sensing data, but their accuracy in WUI areas is unknown. Additionally, CNNs are computationally intensive and technically complex making it challenging for end-users, such as those who use or create WUI maps, to apply. We identified buildings pre- and post-wildfire and estimated building destruction for three California wildfires: Camp, Tubbs, and Woolsey. We used a CNN model from Esri to detect buildings from high-resolution imagery. This dataset represents the state-of-the-art of what is readily available for potential WUI mapping.

Dataset of polygons representing the 2009 designated Wildland Urban Interface. These areas require the additional approval of the County Fire Marshall. The boundaries were determined by the County Fire Warden with assistance from the Mapping Division. All boundaries where determined by on-screen digitizing using parcels, survey lines and aerial photos. The final boundary was approved by the Utah County Commission. The criteria for designation as WUI was determined to be areas where human development, structures and infra-structure meet wildland vegetation, and are in need of additional fire protection due to steep slopes, limited water supply, and extended response times by fire suppression resources. The 2009 Utah County WUI map has been expanded from the 1994 map, to include newly developed and potential development areas. Newly incorporated areas that are now under city jurisdiction, and formerly WUI designated (1994) areas within city jurisdiction have been excluded from the county WUI designation. All lands east of the Wasatch Front including Forest Service, BLM, State, & privately held land kept the WUI designation as established on the 1994 map. This area is in the counties watershed. All Federal lands, (except Camp Williams, DOD), Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and State lands have been designated as WUI as they border potential development. Other boundary lines were established where linear obstacles restrict fire department access, such as canals along the Wasatch Front and around West Mtn., and the underground pipeline through the west desert. Cultivated land has generally not been included as WUI. Where possible easily recognizable ground features, such as roads, were used as boundary lines. Where possible private land parcels were not divided. Township section lines were used where none of the above stated criteria could be applied.

The DNRC Interactive Wildland Fire Map provides up-to-date resources and information related to present and past wildfire incidents in the State of Montana. Leveraging the Esri Web AppBuilder platform, a variety of tools/widgets allow the user to interact with application to better understand forest fires and their impact to the landscape and residents of Montana.

The Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) is the area where houses meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland vegetation. This makes the WUI a focal area for human-environment conflicts such as wildland fires, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and biodiversity decline. Using geographic information systems (GIS), we integrated U.S. Census and USGS National Land Cover Data, to map the Federal Register definition of WUI (Federal Register 66:751, 2001). These data are useful within a GIS for mapping and analysis at national, state, and local levels.

The dataset contains three (1860s, 1970s, 2013) detailed Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) maps of the Polish Carpathians, including information on building density. The maps, available in the form of 10m raster GeoTIFF files, are based on the WUI definition of US Federal Register (USDA and USDI, 2001) as operationalized by (Radeloff et al., 2005), which distinguishes two kinds of WUI: intermix, where housing intermingle with wildland vegetation, and interface, where settlement abuts the wildland areas. Either WUI type requires a housing density higher than 6.17 houses/km2 (1 house/40 acres in the US context). In intermix WUI, there has to be also > 50% wildland vegetation, while the interface WUI, has < 50% wildland vegetation but is within 2.4 km of a wildland vegetation patch larger > 5 km2. Given the ecological context of the Polish Carpathians, we defined wildland vegetation as forests, because forests are the climax vegetation type below the treeline. To assess settlements, we analysed all buildings locations (residential and non-residential), because all buildings reflect human activities. The building density and forest cover share were calculated by using a 500m circular moving window algorithm. AcknowledgementsThe study was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, contract no. UMO-2019/35/D/HS4/00117 and by the NASA Land Use and Land Cover Change Program.