Over 40 years of wildfire-ignition data across 11 western U.S. states showed that national forest areas classified as “roadless” didn’t burn more than national forest land with roads, further fueling discussion around the Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ intent to repeal the 2001 “Roadless Rule.”
Rollins has stated that the nation’s protected forests need to be opened to new road construction, development and logging in order to reduce the risk of wildfires. Rollins has also labeled the rule as an “absurd obstacle to properly managing our forests.”
Researchers out of Oregon State University explicitly cited the USDA’s wildfire-based claims for repealing the 2021 Roadless Rule as the reason behind why they analyzed four decades of fire research. Previous studies have highlighted the ecological benefits of roadless areas, including the conservation of biodiversity and supporting clean air and water quality, and the researchers argue those benefits are why it is important for decision-makers to critically evaluate proposed rationales for overturning the Roadless Rule.
Their study, published on Sept. 8, compiled fire severity and extent data to evaluate fire patterns across developed lands, inventoried roadless areas (IRAs), and wilderness. The fire severity data was sourced from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity program, an interagency effort between the US Geological Survey and Forest Service that uses Landsat satellite imagery to map the extent and severity of all large fires from 1984 to the present.
The researchers found inventoried roadless areas burned at an estimated 1.13 times the annual rate of developed lands between 1984 and 2023. The annual burn rate of inventoried roadless areas dropped to 0.89 times the annual rate of developed lands when measured between 2014 and 2023.
“Our analysis indicates that IRAs across western states’ NFS land are not associated with a significantly greater rate of burning – or a greater rate of moderate and high-severity fire – relative to roaded or developed lands,” the researchers said in the study. “It is possible that burn rates in IRAs [inventoried roadless areas] are stabilizing as fires encounter previously burned areas with less fuel to burn. However, it is more likely that there is simply no consistent, quantifiable difference between patterns of fire in IRAs and the roaded and developed portion of the NFS landscape at the spatial and temporal scales we evaluated.”
The researchers did identify a landscape with a very high burn rate, but it would be unaffected by the Roadless Rule’s repeal. Congressionally designated wilderness areas burned at almost double the annual rate of inventoried roadless areas or developed lands, which they attributed to significant constraints on suppression resource availability during fire seasons and the low prioritization remote wilderness areas receive for both initial attack and containment.
Public comment on removing the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule has been extended to October 6, 2026. Go to this USDA page for more information and to Comment.
PREVIOUS COVERAGE: End to landmark roadless rule will make wildfires more likely, study finds
3 Comments
Fires get larger in roadless and wilderness areas than in areas with maintained roads. That’s common sense and experience talking.
As noted in the science, wilderness areas are often left to burn as a natural process….. And also are low priority being the the cabins are homes…. And the same thing could be said of roadless areas, that they are the last places that are considered priorities, as they tend to not be on the logging list, and they are low priority for suppression.
With respect to the OSU study, without consideration of fire management decisions, the allocation and effectiveness of suppression assets, and fire risk classification of the burned areas, the section on area burned is moot. The ignition frequency by area is useful if it can be linked to road proximity.
If you are worried about the larger picture, two documents provide a much better picture of the “roadless” IRA issue.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/29/2025-16581/special-areas-roadless-area-conservation-national-forest-system-lands
Draft Environmental Impact Statement – 2001 Roadless Rule Rescission
https://downloads.regulations.gov/FS-2025-0001-224064/content.pdf
IRA’s have changed since 2001.
“About half of these lands are within 1 mile of a road.”
“About 23 percent (10.2 million acres) of inventoried roadless areas managed under the 2001
Roadless Rule are within the wildland-urban interface (WUI) … An additional 4.8 million
acres are within one mile of the WUI, totaling about 35 percent of these inventoried roadless area acres.”
IRA’s aren’t really that roadless.
“According to Forest Service roads datasets, there are currently approximately 9,500 miles of
roads within the potentially affected IRA”
IRA’s need mitigation
“Across potentially affected IRAs outside of Alaska, 42 percent of lands are classified as high or very high Wildfire Hazard Potential”
I would think that an IRA area classified as a high or very high wildfire risk that already includes some WUI or abuts or is near the WUI, would demonstrate a very clear requirement for allowing road access for mitigation, prompt initial attack, suppression, and post fire remediation.
Bean