Mapping the wildland-urban interface at municipal level for wildfire exposure analysis in mainland Portugal

The Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), where vegetation and built-up structures intermingle, encompasses a variety of territorial elements that interact spatially, being variable both in space and time. Mapping the WUI at finer scales is paramount to assess wildfire exposure and define tailored mitigation strategies. Our aim was to develop a semi-automated method to map the WUI at municipal level, leveraging recent advances in data and technology. We tested the procedure in four municipalities of mainland Portugal with different fire history, biophysical conditions, and sociodemographic contexts. We considered WUI as either intermix or interface. Our approach integrates both building location data and high-resolution vegetation maps, to calculate the density of buildings and forest cover proportion within different circular moving window sizes. Within each radius, we evaluated the total area and spatial distribution of the WUI types, as well as the number of buildings within WUI and within the fire perimeters recorded between the years 2000 and 2022 and analysed the differences between municipalities. We then compared the mapped WUI with previous WUI mappings for mainland Portugal, to identify common spots and potential spatial divergences. We found that the area mapped as WUI within all four municipalities ranged from about 400 km