Talk:List of national forests of the United States

North Dakota?

If there are no national forests in North Dakota, why is it colored with the 1-3% shade on the map? 173.233.34.132 (talk) 09:51, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

The Forest Service also manages United States National Grasslands, and there are apparently several in North Dakota, such as Little Missouri National Grassland. Although this page is titled "List of U.S. National Forests", the map shows "land managed by the National Forest Service", which would include national grasslands. That's my guess anyway. Pfly (talk) 11:26, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Big revision coming

I am working on remaking this list into one like the List of national parks of the United States and List of National Monuments of the United States. You can see some of my progress at my sandbox. If you have comments or suggestions let me know below. Major changes to the format will be easier sooner rather than later. I am also planning to rewrite the intro paragraphs and add a national map of forests. Fredlyfish4 (talk) 14:40, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

It seems like Choctawhatchee National Forest ought to be included here. The main reason I can see for not including it is that the USFS doesn't have a webpage for it. But otherwise it seems similar to other small forests (e.g. Finger Lakes National Forest) that are listed separately even though they are administered by a larger adjacent forest.Plantdrew (talk) 16:42, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

This is an issue that I have been trying to sort out and will deal with when I revise the article in a few weeks. The area listed by the annual USFS land areas document shows the area of Choctawhatchee NF decreasing from ~1100 acres in 2007 to ~750 in 2010, and now the forest isn't even listed in the 2012 publication with the entire area having been added to Apalachicola NF. Choctawhatchee NF is so small, in disconnected parcels, and has no facilities. The relationship between Choctawhatchee NF and Apalachicola NF is really different than between any other forests. The closest would be Idaho Panhandle National Forest, which is still sometimes known as its three constituent forests. The only mention of Choctawhatchee NF on the USFS website is that it became Elgin AFB. All of Florida's National Forests are actually managed together. See my comment on Wikipedia:Peer review/List of U.S. National Forests/archive1 about some of the ideas that I have to deal with these forests. The only reason for including it is that it is needed so that there are 155 National Forests, which is the official number. But I don't want to list all 155 separately because, as in the notes of the article, some forests such as Salmon-Challis are almost never known as separate forests. I just wish the USFS would be more consistent with all this. Fredlyfish4 (talk) 23:56, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

LTBMU is a national forest, per the sources

The Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit is a national forest within Region 5 (Pacific Southwest) of the Forest Service. This is amply sourced - see, for example, the Region 5 map, which treats LTBMU as a national forest alongside the others in the region. The LTBMU has a Forest Supervisor and is one of the 18 NF Supervisor's Offices listed here, as confirmed by the regional fact sheet. The LTBMU has a Forest Plan, just as any other NF would have. The management structure of the LTBMU is a national forest, as far as R5 is concerned. Its name and status is funky, but we would do readers a significant disservice by ignoring it in this list just because it doesn't neatly fit the template. Instead, we ought to explain what makes it different. Letting it be orphaned and ignored merely because of the silly bureaucratic name attached to it back in the 1970s doesn't strike me as the right thing to do. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 09:17, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I think this is more appropriately suited for a list of areas managed by the USFS, which would include other areas that total nearly 4.7 million acres (Valles Caldera, Desert Range Exp Station, and numerous other areas). Most of the land managed by LTBMU is still "designated" as the three original national forests, and only 767 acres are designated as LTBMU.[1] (This gets into the confusion between managed and designated boundaries) As the list current stands with LTBMU, the math doesn't add up for total managed area in the USFS system. Just because the area is large enough to be shown on a regional map or have its own supervisor doesn't mean it should be included in this list. By those criteria national grasslands should also be in the same list.Fredlyfish4 (talk) 14:32, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

As you point out above, the agency is maddeningly inconsistent when it comes to these types of data. I work on the Tongass National Forest and we don't even know exactly how many recreation cabins we have. We pretty much just say "about 150" now. If I wasn't furloughed, I could try and pull some LTBMU management docs from FSWeb. The signal issue to me is that the unit is treated and managed as a national forest, and to the public *is* a national forest. It's not a subunit within another NF, like the Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area or Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest.

It's not just the map - it's that R5 explicitly says there are 18 national forests in the region. You cannot get to 18 national forests in R5 without counting LTBMU as one of them. Is that inconsistent with the national number of forests? How many forests does the WO think R5 has? NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 20:46, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Merge

Merge with largest us national forests

articles redundandt

+1 to merge them — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.221.57.38 (talk) 10:00, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

Broken notes

I don't think the notes section is functioning properly. Clicking on the "A" in either the lead or the column heading doesn't take me to the notes list at the bottom, as would be expected. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:32, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Consolidations: Regions, Forests, States, Units, Districts

This simple list of all forests has been very useful and has long served its purposed as a free reference.

It does not list or track the consolidations, hyphenations, and associations. To incorporate a full hierarchical 'tree', would be the next best iteration for this listing.

Many forests already operate through 'hyphenated; administration; many, through state-level consolidation; and many existing ranger districts cooperate through zoning or inhabit the same offices.

Ultimately, the total number of unique sites would range in the hundreds, which is a fairly number for a text-based page. 104.245.108.218 (talk) 21:02, 6 October 2023 (UTC)