Between September 1901 and March 1909, Theodore Roosevelt protected about 230 million acres of public land, roughly a tenth of the country. Slide through his years in office, or press play, to watch it add up.
About the shapes. Each shape is the boundary of the place today, drawn from current U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service data. Many places have grown or shrunk since Roosevelt's day, so a shape shows where a place is, not its exact 1909 outline. Reserves that no longer exist, and places too small to draw, appear as markers.
About the forests. The roughly 150 national forests of 1909 were later merged and renamed into the units mapped here. Each forest is shaded by the reserve at its core: green where Roosevelt first protected it, tan where it was already protected in September 1901. Many tan forests grew larger under Roosevelt; a dashed green edge marks the year he first added land. Acreage figures in the chart are the official totals reported at the time.
About the water projects. The 24 reclamation projects are those whose construction the Secretary of the Interior approved under the Newlands Reclamation Act before March 4, 1909, as listed in the Reclamation Service's annual reports. Each marker sits at the project's signature dam, tunnel or pumping plant. The Rio Grande Project's Elephant Butte Dam, funded by Congress in 1907, was approved for construction in 1910 and is not counted.
Sources. Totals: TR Library, Conservation by the Numbers. Forest history: U.S. Forest Service, Establishment and Modification of National Forest Boundaries and Names, 1891–2012 (FS-612) and the Reports of the Forester, 1902–1909. Bird and game reserves: T.S. Palmer, National Reservations for the Protection of Wild Life (Biological Survey Circular 87, 1912). Parks and monuments: presidential proclamations and acts of Congress; National Park Service. Reclamation: Ninth Annual Report of the Reclamation Service (1910). Boundaries: USFS, NPS, USFWS. Basemap © OpenStreetMap contributors, OpenFreeMap.