Comment Analysis · Docket FS-2025-0001

Southern Off-Road Bicycle Association

Campaign: One letter sent by 10 or more people, copied or lightly reworded. It counts as one unique comment.

Run by Southern Off-Road Bicycle Association — From the action page: https://sorba.org/action-alert-defending-the-roadless-rule/

Opposes rescissionA0 noneSubstance 2/24

25 submissions
25 versions of the text
20 added words of their own

TopicsEnvironmental Protection Biodiversity Recreation Tourism Public Use Resource Development Extraction

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 26Sep 3Sep 24

Aug 26: 15 submissions, 1 unique comments

What it names

National Forests: + Pisgah National Forest
Roadless areas: + Laurel Mountain+ South Mills River
Law cited: + 90 FR 42179

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

The letter

As sent in FS-2025-0001-341147, the comment that stands for the group.

Dear USDA Forest Service Planning Team, As an active trail advocate, mountain biker, and member of the Southern Off-Road Bicycle Association (SORBA), I am writing to express my strong opposition to the proposed rescission of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. I urge the Forest Service to select the “No Action” alternative, maintaining the vital protections provided by the 2001 Roadless Rule. Inventoried Roadless Areas (IRAs) protect intact watersheds, preserve natural landscapes, prevent harmful forest fragmentation, and safeguard irreplaceable backcountry mountain biking experiences. Rescinding the 2001 Rule threatens to open these prized lands to road construction and resource extraction, risking the integrity of beloved non-motorized trail networks, increasing the spread of invasive species, and damaging the outdoor recreation economy that local communities rely upon. The Forest Service should prioritize protecting these unique backcountry spaces. Please uphold existing protections and adopt the “No Action” alternative in the Environmental Impact Statement.

← All campaigns

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.