Quantifying wildfire risk to the built environment in rural rangelands of the US Interior West.

Abstract

Fire 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.This article is part of the theme issue 'Novel fire regimes under climate changes and human influences: impacts, ecosystem responses and feedbacks'.