Comment Analysis · Docket FS-2025-0001

“For 25 years, the Roadless Rule has conserved some of our nation's most intact fish and wildlife habitat…”

Campaign: One letter sent by 10 or more people, copied or lightly reworded. It counts as one unique comment. The record does not say which organisation ran it.

Opposes rescissionA0 noneSubstance 5/24

11 submissions
11 versions of the text
10 added words of their own

TopicsEconomic Impact Fiscal Environmental Protection Biodiversity Forest Management Wildfire Recreation Tourism Public Use

The letter's full analysis →Every submission of it →

When it arrived

Submissions received each day. Tap or hover a bar for its count.

Aug 20Aug 28Sep 3

Aug 20: 4 submissions, 1 unique comments

What it names

Works cited: + 10.1186/s42408-026-00450-2

Names marked + were added by senders and are not in the shared letter.

The letter

As sent in FS-2025-0001-224035, the comment that stands for the group.

For 25 years, the Roadless Rule has conserved some of our nation's most intact fish and wildlife habitat, protected clean water and sustained outstanding backcountry hunting and fishing opportunities. And roadless does not mean unmanaged. The rule allows important management activities, including hazardous fuels reduction and habitat restoration, while keeping these lands open to hunting, fishing, grazing and recreation. Claims that wholesale rescission is necessary to address wildfire risk aren't true. The Roadless Rule already provides flexibility for fuels treatments and other management activities without requiring permanent new roads. And recent research found that wildfire ignitions were roughly four times more likely to occur near roads than in roadless forests, underscoring that more roads are not necessarily the answer to wildfire risk. The Roadless Rule also makes fiscal sense. The Forest Service already manages roughly 370,000 miles of roads and faces approximately $10.8 billion in deferred maintenance, with more than half attributable to roads alone. Adding new roads and long-term maintenance obligations won't solve that problem. Please keep the Roadless Rule intact.

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Sharing & methodology

These results are meant to be shared.

Please cite us. This analysis is the intellectual property of Roadless.org and Nicholas Holshouser. You are welcome to reproduce it — every reproduction must include this citation:

Roadless.org and Nicholas Holshouser, “2001 Roadless Rule Revision — Public Comment Analysis,” https://roadless.org.

How it works. Position and topic classification is performed by a large language model (the open-weight Qwen3.8 27B) that reads each comment and labels its position — supports, opposes, or neutral — and the topics it raises. Copies and campaigns are found by hashes of the text and the overlap of six-to-eight-word phrases, grouped into text families; every unique figure counts one family once. Sentence embeddings (Qwen3) find reworded templates, shown under Organized campaigns, and cross-check the families; lexical, syntactic and stylometric features (TF-IDF, spaCy) score each comment’s originality for review. Neither decides a copy count. The full method is on the Methodologies page of roadless.org.

The full method. Every step, why it is done that way, its known limits and a glossary: Methodologies →

The data. The full canonical dataset — every comment on Docket FS-2025-0001 — is available from Regulations.gov's bulk download, the canonical source: https://www.regulations.gov/bulkdownload. Download the CSV directly (Regulations.gov keeps this link working until October 18, 2026): https://bulk-downloads.regulations.gov/mv4-z8fw-q5jx.csv.

Roadless.org — analysis of the public comment docket.
Media inquiries welcome — nicholas@wanderingnature.com.