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As of 2023 there are 806 designated wilderness areas in the United States ranging in size from Florida's Pelican Island at 5 acres (20,000 m 2) to Alaska's Wrangell-Saint Elias at 9,078,675 acres (36,740.09 km 2).
When the Wilderness Act was passed in 1964, 54 areas (9.1 million acres) in 13 states were designated as wilderness. This law established these areas as part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. Since 1964, the NWPS has grown almost every year and now includes 806 (2023) areas in 44 states and Puerto Rico.
- Scotland
- China
- Amazon
- Europe
Scotland is perhaps the country with the most detailed wilderness mapping in the world today. It has been mapped at global, continental, national, regional and local scales, each one showing progressively more detail, and higher levels of accuracy and reliability. The Scottish government has been able to use these maps to define what should count a...
China is following suit with a similar approach and using national level mappingto define wilderness areas and help develop a new national park system. The country can be neatly divided in two as highlighted by what’s known as the “Hu Line”, a simple straight line that connects Ai-hui in the north-east to Teng-Chong in the south-west. East of this ...
One thing that wilderness maps are particularly good at illustrating is how wild land is being lost to the demand for food, fuel, water, timber and minerals as the human population increases. Maps show that this mainly happens through the road construction associated with logging, oil and gas and mineral extraction. Images of the ongoing fragmentat...
Despite the problems of global wilderness maps, there have been some attempts to overcome the impact of cross-border assumptions and inconsistencies. The variations in wilderness quality have been consistently mapped across Europe as part of an EU project to develop a registerof the EU’s remaining wilderness areas. One thing that this map highlight...
There are 553 national wildlife refuges, and they protect more than 150 million acres of wetlands, forests, prairies and seashores. There are about 20 million acres of designated Wilderness in the Refuge System.
Sep 9, 2015 · To date, over 109 million acres of public lands (half of that in Alaska) have been protected as legal wilderness, an area that makes up five percent of the land of the U.S., though only 2.7...
- Doug Schnitzspahn
The National Wilderness Preservation System includes 806 wilderness areas protecting 111,889,002 acres (174,826.566 sq mi; 452,798.73 km 2) of federal land as of 2023. They are managed by four agencies:
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Today, about 235 million acres of federal wildlands have been permanently protected as wilderness, parks, refuges or other protected areas. But that’s only a third of our public lands. And about 100 million acres of pristine wildlands are still at risk.
