Patrick mentioned this Dashboard, so I thought I would post for people who don’t read comments.
As part of that I’ve built a web app for OneVoice with a dashboard comparing open vs. closed roads in every forest and district to identify areas where there are lots of closed admin and ML1 roads that could be opened to the public.
I think that maybe this is a little overly-numeric, and that the locals probably have a good idea of which roads might make sense to open or make into a trail of some kind- what shape are they in now? Would they also be useful for potential fire suppression? How much maintenance would be required?. I’m sure the proportion of open and closed probably has a lot to do with how many roads the Forest had in the first place. Lots to think about and puzzle over, but I always prefer bottom-up exercises.. like maybe the FS could (or has?) put out maps where the public gets to express its opinion about what roads should be open (or closed) and include why they think so.
Correct, this dashboard is solely quantitative based on raw numbers pulled from FS GIS datasets. It in no way attempts to qualitatively evaluate where new opportunities for motorized use would be valuable or appropriate. It’s also very rough as the underlying FS datasets are not all that accurate and have a lot of errors and ommissions. And a lot of forests may have many more closed roads that have been officially decommissioned and no longer are listed in any FS data set but are still present on the ground.
A few questions/comments come to mind as I look at Rio Grande NF data. First, how can a road be classified as ML1 and be closed? It seems like it wouldn’t be an ML1 road, if it is closed because the forest wouldn’t be maintaining it. Do the closed miles of roads include seasonally closed roads? Does it include roads that were built across NFS land to access private land? Some roads on the RGNF are seasonally closed per agreements with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. I noticed the acreage for the forest is either off or it includes private inholdings.
Interesting data and a good start with the understanding that the devil is in the details.
All ML1 roads are closed to the public by definition. Those are roads “in storage” for either decommissioning or another use like temporary logging roads. Roads with seasonal closures aren’t counted as closed but I did list the total road mileage with seasonal closures separately. Don’t know about private land. I assume mileage across private land is included since this is all based on the FS GIS data for roads and trails. Not sure about forest acreage. That’s just the numbers that were in the FS dataset I used for forest units.
Thanks Patrick. I’ve only been retired seven years and I’m already forgetting the maintenance levels on roads. We used to periodically get a book at the office that included updated acreage for each forest. It provided two numbers, the first being total acres included within the boundaries of forests and the second was acreage of NFS land. When I retired, the Rio Grande NF had 1.83 million acres of NFS land rather than 1.93 million. I hadn’t heard that the forest picked up another 100k acres, but I might of missed it.
I don’t think the idea that any and all roads are good or fire suppression is well-founded and we should be thoughtful when talking about this issue. There may be certain strategic roads that would be a net benefit for suppression, but it should be clear that roads are also a source of ignitions. Opening a road for suppression purposes should be assessed and demonstrated on a case-by-case basis. Too often I see OHV advocates frame this as a black and white issue.
From the abstract of this recent study (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42408-026-00450-2):
“From 1992 to 2024, in all 8 contiguous-US Forest Service regions combined, wildfire-ignition density was lowest in designated wilderness areas (1.75 fires/1000 hectares), followed closely by Inventoried Roadless Areas (1.97 fires/1000 ha). The highest wildfire-ignition density was in lands within 50 m of roads (7.99 fires/1000 ha), and the second highest wildfire-ignition density was in other national forest lands outside of the 50-m road buffers but not in wilderness or roadless areas (3.50 fires/1000 ha). For human-caused, natural, and undetermined fires, wildfire-ignition density decreased as distance to road increased, irrespective of designation categories such as “wilderness” or “roadless.””
and
“Our results suggest that building roads into roadless areas is likely to result in more fires. These fires will, on average, be smaller than fires farther from roads, but there will be more of them, and some of them will grow to become large fires.”
I didn’t say ALL roads are good for wildfire suppression.. as you say, some might be more important than others. As to the numbers in the study, some previous data I looked at said that there were many fewer people recreating in Wilderness, so perhaps an ignition per visitor day would be an appropriate comparison? Otherwise the solution to wildfire would be to have designations that keep more people out. As quoted here, natural caused fires (lightning?) were also more closer to roads? This is one in which I think a proposed mechanism for the observation would be helpful.