These areas where people and wildlands meet are called the wildland-urban interface, or WUI for short. More technically, a WUI (pronounced “woo-ee”) describes anywhere that has at least one house per 40 acres and is also 50% covered by wildland vegetation such as trees, shrubland, grassland, herbaceous wetland, mangroves, moss and lichen.
Areas defined as WUI cover only about 4.7% of land on Earth, but about half of the human population lives within them.
To learn more about the global distribution of wildlife-urban interfaces, explore the team’s interactive tool online.
New data on Steve’s Edge of the Wild interest.
The tool looks impressive.