Digital forestry in the wildland-urban interface

Abstract

Growing human populations have led to the expansion of theWildland-Urban Interface (WUI) across the southeastern United States.The juxtaposition of buildings, infrastructure, and forests in the VVUIcreates challenges for natural resource managers. The presence offlammable vegetation, high rates of human-caused ignitions and highbuilding densities combine to increase risks of catastrophic loss fromwildfire in the WUI. At the same time, fragmentation of large ownershipsinto smaller parcels and changing demographics may limit thepossibilities for managing fuels with prescribed fire. To make effectivedecisions in this environment, land managers will need to integrate alarge volume of information characterizing the physical features,biological characteristics, and human dimensions of these landscapes.Remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies arecrucial in this regard, but they must also be integrated with fieldsurveys, fire behavior models, and decision-support tools to carry outrisk assessments and develop management plans for the WUI. This chapteroutlines the types of geospatial datasets that are currently availableto map fuels and fire risk, provides examples of how GIS has beenapplied in the WUI, and suggests future directions for the integrationof GIS datasets and spatial models to support forest management in theWUI.