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Data from: Quantifying wildfire risk to the built environment in rangelands of the US Interior West

Metadata Updated: June 5, 2025

OverviewFire increasingly conflicts with the built environment. The Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) describes areas where vegetation near the built environment increases wildfire hazard. In the United States, attention concentrates on WUI in forested areas, but human populations are extending into rangelands. The combination of WUI expansion and woody plant encroachment might present novel challenges to wildfire management, especially given the rural nature of rangelands in the US, which extends the response time of emergency services. We use publicly available data to describe the abundance, distribution, type, and overall wildfire risk in rural rangelands. Most of the WUI in the US Interior West (54%) occurs in rangeland: The majority of the US Interior West is rangeland and 4.3% of that—over 1 million km2 —is WUI. Most WUI is rural: 59% is further than 10 km from town and Tribal areas are even more remote. Rangeland WUI is approximately twice as likely to be degraded by woody encroachment than non-WUI rangeland, suggesting that conventional fire suppression tactics for rangeland fuels might be insufficient or unsafe. Greater awareness of rural rangeland WUI might help leverage community-level adaptive capacity against the novel challenges of protecting lives and property beyond urban/peri-urban zones.Files includedThese files include summarized data and R script used to create the analysis described above.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: us-pd

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date June 5, 2025
Metadata Updated Date June 5, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from USDA JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date June 5, 2025
Metadata Updated Date June 5, 2025
Publisher Agricultural Research Service
Maintainer
Identifier 10.15482/USDA.ADC/27905196.v2
Data Last Modified 2025-05-06
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 005:18
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id e9ee5857-d743-4472-bcb7-c312c7633f07
Harvest Source Id d3fafa34-0cb9-48f1-ab1d-5b5fdc783806
Harvest Source Title USDA JSON
License https://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -117.22282269144286, 48.951361163538735, -116.72517991655339, 42.02391635277718, -120.1729664255404, 42.020697055191334, -120.01696456111064, 38.967836981509066, -114.54306862581659, 34.85660167488804, -114.6832958730517, 32.514550114224704, -111.06066874853424, 31.322607705912148, -109.03213360311572, 31.33480834546434, -108.25891017714905, 31.355888352732066, -108.24639534112985, 31.7754135525075, -106.59884725403272, 31.772683839469508, -103.06316071625766, 31.807185365994997, -103.04044212432733, 36.88545053812453, -102.05384882184559, 36.88822301139487, -102.08372027968149, 40.79801610463937, -104.06685608300286, 40.96452680481593, -103.99076822453019, 48.917372469700894, -117.22282269144286, 48.951361163538735}
Program Code 005:040
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 670da785bbc110c0254ebd37bc24b8d3a368ea4715e12d56e75aafbb27f7ad02
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -117.22282269144286, 48.951361163538735, -116.72517991655339, 42.02391635277718, -120.1729664255404, 42.020697055191334, -120.01696456111064, 38.967836981509066, -114.54306862581659, 34.85660167488804, -114.6832958730517, 32.514550114224704, -111.06066874853424, 31.322607705912148, -109.03213360311572, 31.33480834546434, -108.25891017714905, 31.355888352732066, -108.24639534112985, 31.7754135525075, -106.59884725403272, 31.772683839469508, -103.06316071625766, 31.807185365994997, -103.04044212432733, 36.88545053812453, -102.05384882184559, 36.88822301139487, -102.08372027968149, 40.79801610463937, -104.06685608300286, 40.96452680481593, -103.99076822453019, 48.917372469700894, -117.22282269144286, 48.951361163538735}
Temporal 2020-01-01/2024-10-31

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