doi:10.1071/WF24109engScarpa, CarlaElia, MarioD’Este, MarinaSalis, MicheleRodrigues, MarcosArca, BachisioDuce, PierpaoloFiori, Maria Antonella FrancescaPellizzaro, GraziaModelling wildfire activity in wildland–urban interface (WUI) areas of Sardinia, ItalyART-2024-141718Background: Wildfire frequency, magnitude and impacts in wildland–urban interface (WUI) areas are increasing in the Mediterranean Basin.Aims: We investigated the role played by socio-economic, vegetation, climatic, and zootechnical drivers on WUI wildfire patterns (area burned and wildfire ignitions) in Sardinia, Italy. Methods: We defined WUI as the 100-m buffer area of the anthropic layers. We created a comprehensive and multi-year dataset of explanatory variables and wildfires, and then trained a set of models and evaluated their performances in predicting WUI fires. We used the best models to assess the single variable’s importance and map wildfire patterns. Key results: Random Forest and Support Vector Machine were the best performing models. In broad terms, wildfire patterns at WUI were influenced by socio-economic factors and herbaceous vegetation types. Conclusions: Machine learning models can be useful tools to predict wildfire ignitions and area burned at WUI in Mediterranean areas. Implications: Improved knowledge of the main drivers of wildfires at WUI in fire-prone Mediterranean areas can foster the development or optimisation of wildfire risk reduction and prevention strategies.2024http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/14825910.1071/WF24109http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/148259oai:zaguan.unizar.es:148259info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/101003890/EU/FIREURISK - DEVELOPING A HOLISTIC, RISK-WISE STRATEGY FOR EUROPEAN WILDFIRE MANAGEMENT/FirEUriskThis project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No H2020 101003890-FirEUriskinfo:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MICINN/PID2020-116556RA-I00International Journal of Wildland Fire 33, 12 (2024), [16 pp.]by-nchttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.esinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess