The 1990-2020 wildland-urban interface of the conterminous United States - geospatial data: 4th edition

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.