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Wildland Urban Interface: 2020 (Map Service)

Published by U.S. Forest Service | Department of Agriculture | Metadata Last Checked: February 19, 2026 | Last Modified: 2023-10-02
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

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