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Assessing the risk of forest fires in wildland urban interfaces (WUIs) is crucial for wildfire prevention and land management. With the goal of developing an efficient management of fire risk in wildland urban interfaces in European Mediterranean countries, this chapter recommends methods and advices for the identification, characterization and mapping of WUIs as well as for the assessment of the fire hazard, the vulnerability and the damage potential of these areas. These tools are the result of scientific researches and fruit of past experiences analysis. More over this chapter insists on the interest of providing wildland urban interface maps in the purpose to know the real extent of theses areas and to manage their development. It briefly presents the steps of a method to identify, to characterize and to map WUI in European Mediterranean countries combining relevant criteria which are connected to the spatial organization of inhabitant dwellings and the structure of the vegetation. A WUI' typology is established. The method can be easily applied by land agencies or managers easily and is suitable both in large areas or landscape level (small scales) and in local conditions (large scale). Because of their high vulnerability, ignition probability and combustibility, it is important and efficient to focus risk assessment in the WUIs. The chapter brings a method to assess and to map fire hazard levels and vulnerability levels according to WUIs and their environment. Introducing the risk of fire and particularly the vulnerability of the territory with such maps is a way to make the inhabitants becoming aware of fire risk in WUI. This will globally decrease the risk of fire either by reducing fire propagation with biomass removal and or by reducing fire ignition probability together with less carelessness. Accomplishing this goal is strictly related to the designation of suitable prevention messages and preventive actions which can be different according to WUI types.

The paper presents the major outcomes of the produced guide. It particularly describes the method developed for mapping WUIs on large areas and at large scale in the European Mediterranean context. The method used remote sensing and spatial analysis tools. Particularly adapted to the French context, it can be easily adapted according specific contexts observed in different European countries. After specifying accurate definition of wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), a WUI typology was based on the combination of four housing configuration types and three natures of horizontal structure of vegetation determined through objective and quantitative criteria. Housing configuration reveals spatial organization of residential dwellings: isolated, scattered, dense clustered and very dense clustered housing. Horizontal structure of vegetation points out the continuous vegetation, the sparse vegetation or the no existing vegetation in contact with houses. Twelve wildland-urban interface types were produced.In parallel a software tool was developed and briefly presented in the paper in order to map WUIs as automatically as possible. The production of WUI maps presents high interest for quantification of the extension of WUIs on the territory, main characteristics of WUIs, assessment and mapping of fire risk levels in WUIs. The main objective of the guide is to help end-users such as land managers, foresters and fire-fighters to locate WUIs on the ground with a view to develop specific actions for wildfires prevention according to WUI types, to create public awareness programs for inhabitants faced with wildfire risk, and to assess fire fighting difficulties due to urbanization.