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ABSTRACT
Federal wildland fire policy in the United States has been substantially revised over the past 10 years and new emphasis has been given to the wildland-urban interface (WUI), which creates a need for information about the WUI's location and extent. We operationalized a policy definition published in the Federal Register (US Department of the Interior [USDI] and US Department of Agriculture [USDA]), 2001, Urban wildland interface communities within vicinity of federal lands that are at high risk from wildfire. Fed. Regist. 66(3):751-777) to create national maps and statistics of the WUI to guide strategic planning. Using geographic information system analysis, we evaluate the national WUI by altering the definition's parameters to assess the influence of individual parameters (i.e., housing density, vegetation type and density, and interface buffer distance) and stability of outcomes. The most sensitive parameter was the housing density threshold. Changes in outputs (WUI homes and area) were much smaller than parameter variations suggesting the WUI definition generates stable results on most landscapes. Overall, modifying the WUI definition resulted in a similar amount of WUI area and number of homes and affected the precise location of the WUI.
Keywords: wildland-urban interface; wildland fire; housing growth; GIS sensitivity analysis; wildland fire policy
The wildland-urban interface (WUI) has become the central focus of wildland fire policy in the United States. The tragic 1994 Storm King incident, in which 14 firefighters were killed, initiated intense scrutiny of wildfire policy and management (US Department of the Interior [USDI] and US Department of Agriculture [USDA] 2006). When the Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy and Program Review was issued the following year, it clarified the role of the federal agencies in fighting fires in the WUI (USDI and USDA 1995). A 10-year overhaul of US wildland fire policy followed, spurred on by the extreme fire season of 2000. Each of the reports and initiatives issued in successive years-the Report to the President in September of 2000, the 10-year Comprehensive Strategy of 2001, its implementation plan and the Healthy Forest Initiative in 2002, and the Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA), which became law in 2003-reiterated the need for resource managers to work with communities and homeowners in the WUI to reduce the risks associated with wildfire.
The increasing national...