What are some key wildland-urban interface issues?

• Demographic changes: People are living longer, migrating from one region of the US to another, and immigrating from abroad, making us much more diverse as a country than at any other time in our history.
• Diverse public attitudes and perceptions: As our population ages and becomes more ethnically and culturally diverse, public attitudes, perceptions, and values undergo change. One change is that forest ecosystems are increasingly valued more for the services they provide, such as clean water, beauty, and inspiration, than for the direct economic benefits that can be derived from them.
• Land use planning and policy: A major factor contributing to interface problems across the South include a lack of vision and little or no planning and regional coordination for comprehensive growth management. Current land-use policies are difficult to implement across federal, state, and local jurisdictions, which often overlap and result in conflicting land-use decisions.
• Economic and taxation issues: As cities grow, more people prefer to develop in the interface for lower property taxes and a natural setting. But as more people move to the interface, land values and property taxes rise, forcing some large landowners to subdivide or move.
• Land-use change: As development increases, forests are continually being fragmented into smaller patches that are surrounded by nonforest land uses including residential developments. Based on the current trends of urbanization across the South, it is likely that forested habitats will continue to be permanently altered and the amount of available wildlife habitat will decrease in some areas.
• Changes to ecosystems: The most obvious direct influence of human activities on forests is the reduction of total forest area and fragmentation. Human influences indirectly alter forest ecosystems by modifying hydrology, altering nutrient cycling, introducing non-native species, modifying disturbance regime, and changing atmospheric conditions.
• Risks from increased human influences: Important risks associated with urbanization include changes in the frequency, severity, and types of natural disturbance regimes, such as fires, floods and winds.
• Lack of public education about natural resource issues: Focus group participants believe the public undervalues the contribution of natural resources to our health and well-being. People in general need to better understand the relationship between human activities and consequences to the environment.
• Challenges of managing natural resources: Surveys of landowner objectives increasingly find that preserving aesthetics, and recreational uses, rank higher than timber management and harvesting, creating new challenges for natural resource professionals as they balance public values with landowner wishes.