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

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the proposed repeal of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. I work in IT, I have 2 dogs, and I frequent wild nature spaces weekly, they should be protected. 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 areas are essential habitats for many federally threatened and endangered species. A biological assessment in the Forest Service's Draft Environmental Impact Statement made a "may affect, likely to adversely affect" determination for 327 ESA-listed species and 71 designated critical habitats under the proposed repeal (USDA Forest Service, 2026). Roadless Areas contain more than 220 threatened or endangered species, representing roughly 25% of all listed or proposed animal species and 13% of listed plant species in the United States (Loucks et al., 2003). For example, the six federally designated grizzly bear recovery zones in the northern Rockies include roughly 15,300 square kilometers of Inventoried Roadless Areas (IRAs), with nearly 24,750 square kilometers of nearly contiguous IRAs surrounding the Salmon-Selway Recovery Zone alone (Loucks et al., 2003). And wolf populations require road densities below about 0.5 km per square kilometer to persist long-term, yet very few places in the Middle Atlantic Coastal Forest ecoregion fall below that threshold (Heilman et al., 2002). Rescinding the Roadless Rule would open critical habitat to new road construction and development, undermining recovery efforts for these already vulnerable species. In summary, the current rule has been working, and should not be repealed. 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. Loucks, C., Brown, N., Loucks, A., & Cesareo, K. (2003). USDA Forest Service roadless areas: Potential biodiversity conservation reserves. Conservation Ecology, 7(2), Article 5. http://www.consecol.org/vol7/iss2/art5