This research article created new WUI maps for the conterminous United States based on 125 million individual building locations, offering higher spatial precision compared to existing maps based on U.S. census housing data. Building point locations were based on a building footprint data set from Microsoft. We classified WUI across the conterminous United States at 30-m resolution using a circular neighborhood mapping algorithm with a variable radius to determine thresholds of housing density and vegetation cover. New maps were created of interface, intermix, and total WUI based on the Microsoft building footprints data set, which allowed us to precisely identify where buildings interact with wildland vegetation and address some of the limitations of coarse-scale maps based on census block-level housing densities.

Keywords: exurban development, fragmentation, housing, human–wildlife conflict, rural development, urbanization, wildland fire, data, maps

• TAGS:
• data,
• exurban development,
• fragmentation,
• housing,
• human–wildlife conflict,
• maps,
• rural development,
• urbanization,
• wildland fire