Wildland–urban interface

The wildland–urban interface (WUI) is a zone of transition between wilderness (unoccupied land) and land developed by human activity – an area where a built environment meets or intermingles with a natural environment. Human settlements in the WUI are at a greater risk of catastrophic wildfire. In the United States, the wildland–urban interface (WUI) has two definitions. The US Forest Service defines the wildland–urban interface qualitatively as a place where "humans and their development meet or intermix with wildland fuel." Communities that are within of the zone are included. A quantitative definition is provided by the Federal Register, which defines WUI areas as those containing at least one housing unit per . The Federal Register definition splits the WUI into two categories based on vegetation density: Intermix WUI, or lands that contain at least one housing unit per in which vegetation occupies more than 50% of terrestrial area; a heavily vegetated intermix WUI is as an area in which vegetation occupies over 75% of terrestrial area (at least 5 km2). Interface WUI, or lands that contain at least one housing unit per in which vegetation occupies less than 50% of terrestrial area (at least 2.4 km2). Human development has increasingly encroached into the wildland–urban interface. The WUI was the fastest-growing land use type in the United States between 1990 and 2010. Factors include geographic population shifts, expansion of cities and suburbs into wildlands, and vegetative growth into formerly unvegetated land. The primary cause has been migration. Of new WUI areas, 97% were the result of new housing. In the United States there are population shifts towards the WUIs in the West and South; increasing nationally by 18 percent per decade, covering 6 million additional homes between 1990 and 2000 which in 2013 was 32 percent of habitable structures. Globally, WUI growth includes regions such as Argentina, France, South Africa, Australia, and regions around the Mediterranean sea.

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Related concepts (4)

Wildfire

A wildfire, forest fire, bushfire, wildland fire or rural fire is an unplanned, uncontrolled and unpredictable fire in an area of combustible vegetation. Depending on the type of vegetation present, a wildfire may be more specifically identified as a bushfire (in Australia), desert fire, grass fire, hill fire, peat fire, prairie fire, vegetation fire, or veld fire. Some natural forest ecosystems depend on wildfire. Wildfires are distinct from beneficial human usage of wildland fire, called controlled or prescribed burning, although controlled burns can turn into wildfires.

Habitat fragmentation

Habitat fragmentation describes the emergence of discontinuities (fragmentation) in an organism's preferred environment (habitat), causing population fragmentation and ecosystem decay. Causes of habitat fragmentation include geological processes that slowly alter the layout of the physical environment (suspected of being one of the major causes of speciation), and human activity such as land conversion, which can alter the environment much faster and causes the extinction of many species.