U.S. Wilderness Area Designations and Inholdings

Over 800 federally protected wilderness areas in the United States, designated since 1964 and managed by four federal agencies. The dataset includes information on non-federal land parcels, known as inholdings, located within wilderness boundaries. It is published by the State of Oregon and was last updated in April 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyze the growth of the wilderness system over time using the year of designation field.
• Map the spatial distribution and size of wilderness areas to assess regional conservation coverage.
• Identify non-federal inholdings and edgeholdings within wilderness boundaries for land access and trespass prevention planning.
• Compare wilderness area management across the four responsible federal agencies (Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service, National Park Service).
• Calculate the percentage of total U.S. land area or the contiguous U.S. land area designated as wilderness.

Strengths

• Covers over 800 wilderness areas across the United States.
• Includes temporal data based on the original year of designation, starting from 1964.
• Contains a separate data layer for non-federal inholdings and edgeholdings within wilderness boundaries.

Limitations

• The exact number of rows and specific column schema are not provided in the input.
• Wilderness areas represent only about 5% of the total U.S. land area, limiting analysis of broader landscapes.
• Non-federal inholdings are described as generally small, which may limit their analytical significance in some spatial analyses.

Provenance

Source

State of Oregon, referencing Wilderness Connect as the authoritative source for wilderness information.

Collection Method

Aggregated from federal land management agencies (Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service, National Park Service).

Time Range

1964 to present (year of designation).

Freshness

Data was last updated in April 2026.

Geography

United States, with specific mention of Alaska containing over half of the designated wilderness area.