Roadless status under the Roadless Area Conservation Rule is not associated with increased wildfire in the US National Forest System

Abstract The US Department of Agriculture has proposed rescinding the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which generally prohibits timber harvest and road building in inventoried roadless areas across the National Forest System. The need to address wildfire is cited as a primary purpose for overturning the Roadless Rule. To facilitate informed decision making, we analyzed four decades of spatially explicit wildfire data across the 11 western states to assess differences between the extent of fire and the extent of different fire severity classes in inventoried roadless areas versus the roaded and developed portions of the national forest landscape. Our analysis indicates that inventoried roadless areas and developed lands burned at broadly similar annual proportional rates. From 1984 to 2023, inventoried roadless areas burned at an estimated 1.13 times the annual rate of developed lands (95% CI: 0.92 to 1.36). From 2014 to 2023, inventoried roadless areas burned at an estimated 0.89 times the annual rate of developed lands (CI: 0.70 to 1.17). Congressionally designated wilderness areas, which would be unaffected by the proposed rule change, burned at almost double the annual rate of inventoried roadless areas or developed lands. This study shows that roadless areas and developed lands burn at similar rates, demonstrating that the Roadless Rule has limited overall influence on wildfire at broad spatial scales.