Wildland-urban interface maps for the conterminous U.S. based on 125 million building locations

The wildland-urban interface (WUI) is the area where urban development occurs in close proximity to wildland vegetation. We generated WUI maps for the conterminous U.S. using building point locations (Carlson et al. 2022), offering higher spatial resolution compared to previously developed WUI maps based on U.S. Census Bureau housing density data (Radeloff et al., 2017). Building point locations were obtained from a Microsoft product released in 2018, which classified building footprints based on high-resolution satellite imagery. Maps were also based on wildland vegetation mapped by the 2016 National Land Cover Dataset (Yang et al., 2018). The mapping algorithm utilized definitions of the WUI from the U.S. Federal...

Categories: Data; Tags: USGS Science Data Catalog (SDC), United States, habitat alteration and disturbance, habitat fragmentation, human impacts, All tags... land use and land cover, wildland fire, Fewer tags

Reduced Fire Severity Offers Near-Term Buffer to Climate-Driven Declines in Conifer Resilience Across the Western United States

Increasing fire severity and warmer, drier postfire conditions are making forests in the western United States (West) vulnerable to ecological transformation. Yet, the relative importance of and interactions between these drivers of forest change remain unresolved, particularly over upcoming decades. Here, we assess how the interactive impacts of changing climate and wildfire activity influenced conifer regeneration after 334 wildfires, using a dataset of postfire conifer regeneration from 10,230 field plots. Our findings highlight declining regeneration capacity across the West over the past four decades for the eight dominant conifer species studied. Postfire regeneration is sensitive to high-severity fire, which...

Categories: Publication; Types: Citation