JACKSON - Visitors to certain national parks will see smaller numbers of wildlife and more impaired scenery unless a national rule protecting roadless areas is reinstated, according to three conservation groups.

In a report released last week, the groups said 20 percent of all forest areas that will have roadless protections repealed directly border or are near national parks.

Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks were cited as two of the 23 threatened parks in the country.

"The basic premise is that no park is an island," Peter Altman, director of the Campaign to Protect Public Lands, said. "A park is intrinsically affected by what goes on outside its borders."

Altman said his group - along with the Coalition of Concerned National Park Service Retirees and the Heritage Forests Campaign - took maps of the park and maps of areas deemed to be roadless and put them over each other. Then, the groups identified areas contiguous to national parks or within 25 miles and separated by wilderness areas to determine the most threatened parks.

"In some, we feel very strongly that if development occurs to the extent now allowed by the Bush administration, it is really going to be turning these parks into front-row seats for the destruction of our forests," Altman said.

But Ernie Schmidt, president of the Wyoming Timber Industry Association, disagrees.

"The management of the national forests should be decided through the forest planning process, not through a rule that is dictated by the president," Schmidt said, referring to the Clinton administration's 11th-hour adoption of the roadless rule.

"There is a difference between national forests and national parks," Schmidt said. "(National forests) are not to be managed as a buffer to national parks, they are managed for multiple use. … National parks are adequately sized to provide their own buffer strips."

Schmidt said that if a forest plan or a state governor determines that roads in an area of forest will adversely affect a national park, those areas can be petitioned to be protected.

In its report, the groups examined land available for endangered species and said building in roadless areas would hurt recovery.

The report said with current conditions, wolves will have 17.1 percent less land and grizzly bears will have 26.4 percent less.

"If no new road construction occurs these losses are reduced by almost 50 percent to 14.6 percent (land loss) for grizzly bear and 10.8 percent for wolves," the report said.

Last month, the Bush administration announced it was repealing the Clinton-era roadless rule, in which certain areas of national forests would not allow any road building to take place. This essentially prevented any development from taking place in those areas.

The Bush administration said any decisions on roadless areas should rest with governors of the states with the forests. The Bush rule, which is open for public comment through September, repeals the designation of Clinton's roadless areas and allows state governors to petition the Department of Agriculture should they want an area to remain roadless.

The department has the final say whether the area should remain closed to road building.

Altman said national control over federal lands is key, because different forest managers might see development differently.

Schmidt said those managers will be tailoring uses in the forests to the current needs.

The conservation groups also identified Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Badlands, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain, Olympic and Rainier national parks as threatened by the new roadless rules. The 23 parks are in 16 states.

Environmental reporter Whitney Royster can be reached at (307) 734-0260 or at royster@trib.com.

Roadless acres near parks

Yellowstone and Grand Teton threatened acres: 2,219,791 acres

Bordering roadless acreage: 7,829,760

Nearby roadless acreage: 450,714

Combined roadless acreage: 8,280,474

Source: Collateral Damage