Silver City, NM, November 20, 2017—For Immediate Release. The Gila National Forest is currently revising its land and resource management plan – also known as the Forest Plan. As one part of the larger Plan Revision effort, each national forest undertaking Forest Plan Revision is required to complete a process of identifying and evaluating lands that may be suitable for inclusion in the National Wilderness Preservation System, and determine whether to recommend any of the evaluated lands to Congress for wilderness designation. Congress reserves the authority to designate wilderness through legislation.

The Gila National Forest has developed a draft inventory map as the first step of a four-step process. The map is now available for public review and comment. The inventory step is an initial narrowing down of areas that may have wilderness characteristics. It is a mapping exercise where obvious locations on the Forest landscape that do not have wilderness characteristics are removed. The Gila National Forest developed the final inventory process paper used to produce the draft inventory map after listening to stakeholder ideas during community and technical meetings and review periods that provided opportunities to submit written comments.

This first step is meant to be broad and inclusive, which means that many areas of the Gila National Forest are included in the draft inventory map. Keep in mind that this is only a preliminary step in a larger process and inclusion of an area in the inventory step does not mean the area will be proposed or managed as a wilderness. These areas are ones that will be further examined for their level of wilderness character. Being included in the inventory also does not imply any sort of designation, or require any special management direction.

According to Adam Mendonca, Forest Supervisor for the Gila, "Continued public involvement will be key during each step of the inventory and evaluation process. The most valuable inputs the Forest can receive are comments specific to areas that individuals feel were incorrectly inventoried as part of the first step in the process."

The Gila National Forest welcomes public comments on areas that should be reconsidered for inclusion or removal from the inventory based on substantially noticeable improvements or the other inventory criteria. Substantially noticeable improvements are defined in the collaboratively developed final inventory process paper.

After receiving and considering feedback from the public on the draft inventory map, the Forest Service will finalize the inventory map and begin the second step of the process, evaluation. In this step, the lands identified in the inventory will be evaluated on the level of wilderness characteristics they possess according to criteria found in the draft evaluation process paper. Please help us by providing your feedback on how to evaluate these criteria.

Comments on the draft inventory maps and draft evaluation process paper are most useful if received by December 20, 2017. Your comments will help the Forest Service create accurate documents to support appropriate and informed decision-making. To access these draft materials and find more information on how to comment, please visit our website at: https://go.usa.gov/xnDRD. There will be future opportunities to comment on future steps in the process as well.

For information on the Gila National Forest, check out our website at http://www.fs.usda.gov/gila or join the conversation on Facebook at www.facebook.com/GilaNForest/ or follow us on Twitter @GilaNForest.