Federally designated wilderness areas under the National Wilderness Preservation System are the most protected public lands in the U.S. Today there are 803 wilderness areas (111.7 million acres) across 44 states and Puerto Rico. The Forest Service manages 448 wilderness units totaling about 36 million acres. Wilderness areas overlay the traditional homelands of American Indian tribes and Alaskan natives. Consequently, today wilderness is part of our national and tribal identity and provides myriad benefits to all Americans, from spiritual renewal and recreation opportunity to clean air and water, wildlife habitat, food, and economic security.

Much of the Forest Service’s research on wilderness takes place through the interagency Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute. This research includes wilderness recreation experiences and impacts, the relationships between people and wilderness lands, impacts and values of wildland fire, management scenarios in the context of climate change, the benefits of wilderness within larger social, economic, and ecological systems, and much more.

We invest in wilderness research because:

• Law and policy dictate that federal land management, including wilderness, is guided by high-quality science and information. The Wilderness Act specifies that wilderness areas shall be devoted to public purposes, including scientific use.

• The proportion of the U.S. population participating in nature-based recreation is growing. Between 2005-2014, recreational use of wilderness areas dramatically increased, growing at a rate more than three times the rate of general population growth.

• The Wilderness Act states that the wilderness system was established “…for the permanent good of the whole people…”. Much work remains to understand the relevance of wilderness areas to underserved and underrepresented communities and how to build relationships between all people and wilderness.

• Wilderness areas are critical to mitigating the impacts of climate change. Wilderness areas sequester carbon at a rate roughly equivalent to that of all other lands managed by all federal land management agencies combined. A disproportionately high percentage of the nation’s renewable supply of surface freshwater also flows from wilderness.

• Wilderness provides direct economic benefits to rural communities across America. From 1980-2010, in-migration to rural western U.S. counties with wilderness areas nearby increased by 8 percent on average, whereas in-migration to other rural western U.S. counties remained constant (zero growth on average).