Synopsis As urban communties grow and expand into wild areas, the interface between these two environments is becoming a high priority to federal land management agencies. It is important that the federal government educates homeowners, firefighters, local officials and land managers regarding the value of wildland fire to the rangeland ecosystem and risk it poses to human endeavors therein. In this educational effort, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Upper Snake River District (USRD) Geographic Information Systems (GIS) team and Idaho State University’s (ISU) GIS Training and Research Center (GIS TReC), are combining efforts to create models to estimate the risk wildland fire poses to homes in the Wildland/Urban Interface (WUI).

A project called Historic Wildfires, which shows an overall decreasing trend in acres burned from 1939-1997 was also made in cooperation between the BLM USRD GIS-team and ISU's GIS TReC. One of the goals of the project was to convert handdrawn wildfire maps to digital format and produce a topologically correct, minimally attributed "Fire polygon history GIS".

The WUI project began in earnest with the generation of risk models for Pocatello, Idaho, and surrounding areas during the spring of 2002. Building on the same methods, risk models for Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, were built during the summer of 2002. In the spring of 2003, the methods used to make these models were adapted to estimate WUI fire risk for all of Clark County, Idaho. Since then, the WUI program has developed fire risk models for other counties in Eastern Idaho, such as Bannock and Power Counties.