Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) maps of Poland

The dataset contains six Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) maps of Poland, based on different radii used to calculate building density and forest cover share. The maps 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. As there are visible differences in building density and forest cover share calculations for different radii, we applied a circular moving window algorithm testing six radii: 100, 250, 500, 750, 1000 and 1500 meters, which resulted in six respective maps. Smaller radii have the advantage that even small groups of buildings are mapped as WUI and focus on ecological processes that operate on short distances (e.g., noise pollution), whereas larger radii have the advantage that they focus on larger WUI areas, and reflect ecological processes operating at longer distances better (e.g., habitat fragmentation for wildlife species with large territories. The recommended WUI map, for those, who are not interested in a specific application is the one based on 500 m. More details on the consequences of using a particular map are shown in the research paper linked to this dataset.

Acknowledgments
The 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.