The Trump administration rescinded the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule in June 2025, arguing that new forest roads are essential to fighting wildfires in remote national forests. A peer-reviewed study published weeks before that announcement — and released publicly in January 2026 — arrives at the opposite conclusion: roads don’t prevent wildfires. They start them.
The study, published in the journal *Fire Ecology* by lead author Greg Aplet, Ph.D., Senior Forest Scientist at The Wilderness Society, examined 32 years of wildfire data across all eight contiguous U.S. Forest Service regions. The findings are unambiguous.
What the Data Shows
The study analyzed fire ignitions from 1992 through 2024, cataloguing ignition density — fires per thousand hectares — by distance from roads and land designation. The pattern is stark and consistent.
Lands within 50 meters of a road recorded the highest ignition density in the entire dataset: 7.99 fires per 1,000 hectares. Inventoried Roadless Areas recorded 1.97 fires per 1,000 hectares. Designated wilderness areas — the most road-free lands in the National Forest System — posted the lowest ignition density of all, at just 1.75 fires per 1,000 hectares.
That’s a 4.5-fold difference between the most road-adjacent land and true wilderness. And critically, the pattern held in every single Forest Service region — Pacific Northwest, Intermountain West, Rocky Mountain, Southwest, and beyond.
“The big surprise was just how stark the differences were. We found the exact same result in every Forest Service region, consistent across the entire National Forest System.”
— Greg Aplet, Ph.D., Senior Forest Scientist, The Wilderness Society
The mechanism isn’t mysterious. Roads bring people, and people start fires. According to Congressional Research Service data, 89 percent of wildfires nationwide are human-caused — the result of vehicle spark arrestors, campfires, tossed cigarettes, dragged chains, and downed power lines, virtually all of which require human proximity. Roads create that proximity in places that were previously remote.
Roads also alter forest ecology. They create gaps in the forest canopy, allowing wind and sunlight to penetrate and dry out the understory vegetation that acts as tinder. In the Great Basin, roads enable the spread of cheatgrass — an invasive annual that cures into a continuous, rapid-burning fuel bed. Even lightning-caused ignition rates are elevated near roads, the study found, because of these altered fuel conditions rather than any increase in actual lightning strikes.
A Rule Designed to Prevent Exactly This
The irony runs deep. When the Forest Service drafted the environmental impact statement for the original Roadless Area Conservation Rule in 2001, it reached the same conclusion the Aplet study reached in 2026. The agency’s own analysis stated plainly:
“Building roads into inventoried roadless areas would likely increase the chance of human-caused fires due to the increased presence of people.”
The same EIS noted that prohibiting road construction in roadless areas “would not cause an increase in the number of acres burned by wildland fires or in the number of large fires.” The Forest Service, in other words, has understood this dynamic for a quarter century. The Aplet study confirms it with three more decades of fire data.
The Administration’s Argument — and Its Limits
The Trump administration’s June 2025 rescission announcement, signed by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, argues that road access is operationally essential for firefighters — that without roads, crews cannot reach ignition points, construct fire lines, or safely evacuate communities. The USDA estimates that nearly 28 million acres of inventoried roadless lands face high or very high catastrophic wildfire hazard potential.
The Forest Service current response acknowledged as much: roads “can increase the likelihood of human-caused fires” but improve access for crews “when timing is critical, and lives are at risk.”
The Aplet study does not dismiss that concern entirely. It acknowledges that fires near roads tend to be smaller in average size — 49 hectares on average, compared to 239 hectares for wilderness fires. However, the study also found that for the largest, most catastrophic fires — the ones that escape initial attack and burn for weeks — there is no meaningful size difference between roaded and roadless areas. Roads may help contain small fires before they spread but offer no advantage once a fire has become a major conflagration.
Experienced wildland firefighters add important nuance to the road-access argument as well. Specialized remote-access methods have long been standard in Forest Service operations: helicopter insertion, rappelling crews, and smokejumpers who parachute from nine western bases directly into remote terrain. These tools have enabled effective fire response in roadless and wilderness areas for decades — without requiring permanent road infrastructure that generates additional ignitions year-round.
What’s at Stake
The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, in place since 2001, has protected approximately 58–60 million acres of National Forest System land from road construction and commercial logging. The current rescission process would eliminate those protections for roughly 45 million of those acres — while leaving Colorado and Idaho under state-specific rules.
The ecological stakes extend well beyond fire. Roadless areas provide habitat for up to 57 percent of vulnerable terrestrial wildlife species in the lower 48 states, and serve as the drinking water source for up to 60 million Americans. More than 1,600 at-risk species — including 200 protected under the Endangered Species Act — rely on roadless habitats.
Understanding how wildfire management policy interacts with forest health and ecosystem resilience matters for everyone who depends on working forests. As the Forest Thinning: A Strategy for Boosting Tree Resilience and Biodiversity discussion on this site explored, the relationship between forest treatment and fire risk is nuanced — and the data must lead the policy, not the other way around. The same principle is at play in How Megafires Are Remaking American Forests, where the limits of road-based suppression are already playing out at scale. And as Why Firefighting Alone Won’t Stop Western Mega-Fires makes clear, the largest fires require landscape-scale solutions that roads alone cannot deliver.
The Aplet study’s final accounting is straightforward: building roads to prevent fires in previously roadless forests is likely to create more fires than it prevents. The administration may ultimately prevail in rescinding the Roadless Rule — but not because the science supports the rationale it has offered.
*Source: Aplet, G. et al. (2026). “Three-decade record of contiguous-U.S. national forest wildfires indicates increased density of ignitions near roads.” Fire Ecology, 22:8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-026-00450-2*