Wildland-Urban Interface maps for the Polish Carpathians for 1860s, 1970s and 2013

The dataset contains three (1860s, 1970s, 2013) detailed Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) maps of the Polish Carpathians, including information on building density. The maps, available in the form of 10m raster GeoTIFF files, are based on the WUI definition of US Federal Register (USDA and USDI, 2001) as operationalized by (Radeloff et al., 2005), which distinguishes two kinds of WUI: intermix, where housing intermingle with wildland vegetation, and interface, where settlement abuts the wildland areas. Either WUI type requires a housing density higher than 6.17 houses/km2 (1 house/40 acres in the US context). In intermix WUI, there has to be also > 50% wildland vegetation, while the interface WUI, has < 50% wildland vegetation but is within 2.4 km of a wildland vegetation patch larger > 5 km2. Given the ecological context of the Polish Carpathians, we defined wildland vegetation as forests, because forests are the climax vegetation type below the treeline. To assess settlements, we analysed all buildings locations (residential and non-residential), because all buildings reflect human activities. The building density and forest cover share were calculated by using a 500m circular moving window algorithm.

Acknowledgements
The study was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, contract no. UMO-2019/35/D/HS4/00117 and by the NASA Land Use and Land Cover Change Program.