Places & Citations
Public comments don’t just take positions — they name real places and cite real law and real science. Every such mention is extracted exactly as written and counted: the forests and inventoried roadless areas commenters know personally, where commenters tell us they live, the statutes and rules they invoke, and the studies they put in front of the agency. Every figure on this page counts distinct voices. Where thousands of people sent the same campaign letter, what that letter names counts once — so these are measures of how widely something is independently raised, not of how large a mailing list is.
118 of the 122 National Forests appear by name — commenters writing about specific ground they know, not abstractions. Counts are distinct voices: where thousands sent the same campaign letter, the names in it count once, so a forest ranks by how many people independently wrote it rather than by how large one campaign was (109,054 submissions name a forest in total).
794 distinct inventoried roadless areas appear by name. Forest shown when the name is unambiguous; a name shared by several areas is counted once, as written. Names an area shares with a National Forest or mountain range ("White Mountain") are model-reviewed in context — a mention judged to be the forest or range is excluded here, every verdict kept with its rationale. Counts are distinct voices: a campaign letter’s names count once however many people signed it (15,734 submissions name an area in total).
Commenters cite the Roadless Rule’s own regulations, the executive orders driving the rescission, and the statutes and case law behind them — by name and section. Every written form of a citation (“36 CFR Part 294”, “36 C.F.R. § 294.12”) rolls up to the instrument it cites; the exact variants are kept underneath.
Commenters put studies, reports, and data in front of the agency — some from its own DEIS record, cited back to it; some it has never considered.
229 of the 284 cited works do not appear in the agency’s own DEIS record — new information the public has placed before it. The full accounting — which authorities, which works, cited how, by whom — is maintained comment by comment, each mention traceable to the exact text that produced it.
Follow the citations over: the bibliography publishes both lists in full — the works commenters cite and the agency’s own DEIS references — and the annotated DEIS walks the agency’s draft analysis issue by issue, with sample comments on each identified issue.
These results are meant to be shared.
How it works. Place names, legal citations, and referenced works are extracted by deterministic exact matching against curated reference lists — no model in the loop — so every count is reproducible and auditable down to the literal matched text in each comment.