Comment Analysis · Docket FS-2025-0001

“Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the proposed repeal of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. As a…”

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 rescissionA3 weakSubstance 8/24

24 submissions
24 versions of the text
24 added words of their own

TopicsEnvironmental Protection Biodiversity Forest Management Wildfire Water Quality Quantity Wildlife Habitat

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 26Aug 31Sep 2

Sep 1: 10 submissions, 0 unique comments

What it names

National Forests: + Deschutes National Forest+ Hiawatha National Forest+ Mark Twain National Forest+ Mendocino National Forest+ Sierra National Forest
Roadless areas: + Rocky Mountain+ Tuolumne River
Works cited: 10.1371/journal.pwat.0000538+ 10.1088/1748-9326/ac13ee

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

The letter

As sent in FS-2025-0001-303327, the comment that stands for the group.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the proposed repeal of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. As a U.S. citizen who enjoys going on hikes in nature, I would like to state that I am against the repeal of the Roadless Rule. Roadless areas support local businesses through recreational use. They protect more than 11,000 climbing and bouldering routes, over 1,000 whitewater paddling runs, and more than 70,000 kilometers of trails, which were estimated in 2017 to have a value of over $500 million (Olden et al., 2026). The Forest Service has identified in their own Draft Environmental Impact Statement (2026) that the proposed rescission would result in local economic losses equal to $9 million per year from reduced trail-based, dispersed, and wildlife-related recreation. That figure uses the agency's conservative assumption of just a 1% loss in visits (USDA Forest Service, 2026). Roadless areas support diverse and abundant wildlife and plant communities. Human activities, primarily road construction, are by far the most extensive agents of forest fragmentation in the United States. Fragmentation is considered one of the leading causes of native species loss and the present extinction crisis (Heilman et al., 2002). The USDA highlighted an experimental study in a roadless area of southern Idaho that found road noise alone caused more than a quarter decline in bird abundance, with nearly a third of species avoiding the noise entirely (USDA Forest Service, 2026). Nearly one-fifth of roadless area watersheds rank in the top quartile for aquatic biodiversity within their states, supporting rich native aquatic fauna (Olden et al., 2026). Repealing the Roadless Rule threatens the intact habitat that supports this abundance and diversity of species. Roadless rules support recreational activities to people who enjoy the outdoors. Thank you for your time and considering my feedback and the data on key considerations regarding the future of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Heilman, G. E., Jr., Strittholt, J. R., Slosser, N. C., & DellaSala, D. A. (2002). Forest fragmentation of the conterminous United States: Assessing forest intactness through road density and spatial characteristics. BioScience, 52(5), 411–422. https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/52/5/411/236110 Olden, J. D., Postel, S. L., Dombeck, M. P., Kesting, H., Freeman, P., & Comte, L. (2026). Assessing the value of the U.S. Roadless Rule for people and nature. PLOS Water, 5(7), Article e0000538. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000538 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service. (2026, August 19). Draft environmental impact statement—2001 Roadless Rule rescission (Vol. I). Docket No. FS-2025-0001.

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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.