onX Launches the Public Land Comment Hub, Giving Hunters, Anglers, and Recreationists a Direct Line Into Federal Land Decisions
For decades, the men who know America's public lands best — the hunters who glass elk basins at 10,000 feet, the anglers who wade cutthroat trout streams on national forest ground, the off-roaders who thread rocky two-tracks across BLM desert — have been the last to find out when those places are threatened by a management proposal. Not because they don't care. Because the system was never built for them. Federal agencies are legally required to gather public input before making many land management decisions, but the notices that trigger those opportunities tend to surface in Federal Register filings, agency websites with inconsistent navigation, and field office bulletins that might as well be written in a different language. By the time a hunter in Montana or a trail rider in Utah stumbles across a relevant proposal, the comment deadline has frequently passed.
onX, the Missoula-based company that turned digital land mapping into an essential tool for millions of American outdoorsmen, is now taking direct aim at that problem. The company has announced the launch of the Public Land Comment Hub, an interactive map and dashboard that brings public comment opportunities and proposals from federal land management agencies together in one place. The tool is free, requires no onX subscription or account, and is designed specifically to make the notoriously convoluted federal land planning process navigable for everyday public land users.
What the Public Land Comment Hub Actually Does
Strip away the press release language and what onX has built is essentially a clearinghouse for federal proposals that affect the ground underfoot. The free resource helps hunters, anglers, off-roaders, hikers, backcountry skiers, and other public land users discover plans and proposals that could impact the places where they recreate, understand what's being considered, and connect directly to official agency portals to submit comments.
The scope of coverage is broad. The Public Comment Hub aggregates active public comment periods and agency-wide proposals from the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Those four agencies collectively manage an enormous share of the land that hunters and outdoor recreationists depend on across the American West and beyond, from the elk country of the Bridger-Teton to the whitetail timber of the Ouachita to the waterfowl flyways running through national wildlife refuges.
Users can explore decisions geographically, filter opportunities by agency, review summaries of proposed actions, see approaching deadlines, and follow links to the appropriate federal agency website. That last feature matters more than it might initially sound. The path from "I heard there's a comment period on a proposed road closure" to actually submitting a substantive comment has traditionally run through a maze of agency acronyms, docket numbers, and PDF downloads. onX routes around all of that.
How the Mapping Works Under the Hood
The cartographic approach behind the hub reflects a practical understanding of how inconsistent federal agencies are when it comes to publishing geographic data. Color-coded overlays show where proposals are active, while a separate dashboard lists agencywide proposals that can't be tied to one location. When an agency publishes geographic data, onX maps the actual project area. When that information isn't available, the hub displays the boundary of the forest, park, refuge, or field office handling the proposal — a broader boundary that doesn't mean every acre is affected, but one that points users toward a decision they otherwise may never have found.
Each listing includes a "Comment Now" link that directs users to the official agency documents and submission portal. onX doesn't collect the comments or tell users which position to take. That distinction is important. The company is positioning itself as a neutral aggregator and access point, not an advocacy organization pushing any particular land use agenda. The tool hands users the map, the deadline, and the link — what they do with it is their call.
No Account Required — And That's the Point
The Public Comment Map is available free to the public. No onX account is required. For a company that generates revenue through paid app subscriptions for onX Hunt, onX Offroad, onX Backcountry, and onX Fish, giving this tool away without a gate is a deliberate choice. The broader the participation, the more meaningful the comment record becomes — and a broader comment record serves everyone who uses public lands, subscribers and non-subscribers alike.
Why This Matters Right Now
The timing of the Public Land Comment Hub launch is not coincidental. The past several years have produced an unusually active period for federal land policy debates, and the stakes in those debates have been high enough that even casual outdoorsmen have been paying attention. Proposals to sell off BLM parcels, to revise forest plans in ways that reduce recreational access, to roll back rules protecting roadless areas — these issues have generated genuine alarm across hunting, fishing, and off-road communities. But alarm without participation doesn't change outcomes.
Plenty of public land fights show up as proposed rules, environmental assessments, management plan revisions, lease sales, and Federal Register notices that fly under the radar. The men most affected by those decisions — the ones who have spent years learning specific drainages, scouting particular units, and building camp traditions in places that could be altered or closed — are often entirely absent from the administrative record simply because they had no practical way to engage.
The scale of what's at stake comes into focus quickly when you look at the numbers. Public lands managed by the BLM alone support 178.5 million outdoor recreation participants who rely on these landscapes to hunt, hike, fish, off-road, ski, climb, and bike. That number represents an enormous constituency — one that has historically been underrepresented in the formal federal comment process relative to industrial interests and organized environmental groups who have entire departments dedicated to tracking agency filings.
The BLM Conservation Rule: A Case Study in What's Lost Without Participation
The consequences of low public engagement in federal comment periods are not hypothetical. In May 2026, the Bureau of Land Management finalized the rescission of its 2024 Conservation and Landscape Health Rule. The BLM received more than 138,000 submissions during the public comment period, including more than 9,000 unique comments, before moving forward with the repeal. The volume of that comment record reflects what happens when people are motivated and informed enough to engage. Whether comments change a final outcome depends on the agency and the administration, but they become part of the legal and administrative record — and they document, in specific terms, who cares about what land and why.
The problem has always been awareness. Federal agencies gather public input before finalizing many land management decisions through planning and environmental review processes — decisions that can influence everything from roads and trails and wildlife habitat to grazing, energy development, and forest management. That's a list covering nearly everything that determines whether a piece of ground is worth hunting, riding, or fishing ten years from now. And yet, the people with the most granular knowledge of that ground — the ones who know where the elk calve and where the roads wash out and what the trail condition looks like after a fire — are routinely absent from the conversation.
onX's Expanding Role as a Public Lands Advocate
The Public Land Comment Hub is the newest product of what has become a deliberate and escalating commitment by onX to function not just as a navigation tool, but as an active participant in the fight to protect and expand public land access. The launch is the latest addition to onX's collection of public access and stewardship resources. By combining trusted geospatial technology with public information, onX continues to expand the ways maps can help people understand, navigate, and engage with the landscapes they explore. Other recent resources include Roadless Rule: By the Numbers and BLM Lands Marked for Potential Sale.
Off-the-beaten-path experiences are at the heart of what onX does, and the company leads initiatives to protect and expand access to public land. Since 2018, onX has worked with various partners to secure and improve public land access through direct funding and by supporting key legislation with data analysis and research.
The BLM Disposal Map: Where It Started
To understand the Comment Hub in context, it helps to look at what onX built immediately before it. In the summer of 2025, the company partnered with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership to address a different but related transparency problem: nobody outside of government land offices could easily see which BLM parcels had been quietly identified as eligible for sale.
The Bureau of Land Management had identified more than 6 million acres of federally managed public land for potential sale. Seventeen Western states contain parcels the BLM has listed as suitable for "disposal" in official Resource Management Plans. Debates about land sales have taken place for decades, but the public had no easy way to see where these parcels marked for potential sale actually sit.
The land disposal process had historically been opaque — often buried in hundreds of pages of government documents. The map was developed using publicly available GIS data derived from 160 individual BLM Resource Management Plans in 17 western states. The tool let any hunter or rancher pull up their unit, zoom in, and see in plain terms whether the BLM ground they'd been hunting for twenty years was on a list somewhere in a federal planning document.
The onX and TRCP map layers display "disposable" parcels along with detailed landscape features, including roads, nearby towns, and adjacent public lands. Users can click on any parcel to see its background, the RMP it comes from, and how long it has been under consideration. The six million acres depicted in the map are not guaranteed to be sold — rather, they have been identified in BLM land use plans as eligible for potential disposal or sale. Identification of lands as eligible for disposal does not trigger immediate action; it means those parcels may be considered for sale if and when a proposal is advanced. Any future sale must go through a multi-step process that includes additional opportunities for public review and comment.
Roadless Rule Analysis: Data as Advocacy
Around the same time, onX also published a detailed analysis of America's roadless areas under the title "The Roadless Rule: By the Numbers," examining what those protected landscapes actually contain in recreational and wildlife terms. These 44.7 million acres have supported hunting, fishing, off-roading, and wildlife habitat for 25 years, and onX wanted all outdoor enthusiasts to stay informed and ready to weigh in once the public comment period opens. The analysis found that Roadless Rule Areas are home to over 17,700 miles of hiking and biking trails, nearly 1,500 miles of mapped backcountry ski routes, and nearly 3,000 climbing areas.
Taken together, the BLM disposal map, the Roadless Rule analysis, and now the Public Land Comment Hub form a coherent strategy: give the public the specific, geographic, digestible information they need to participate meaningfully in decisions that will shape these lands for generations. Each tool is different, but the underlying logic is the same — transparency is the precondition for participation.
The Voice Behind the Tool
onX CEO Laura Orvidas has been direct about what the company is trying to accomplish with tools like the Comment Hub. "The people who spend time on public lands have firsthand knowledge of these places and a meaningful stake in the decisions that shape them," Orvidas said. "By bringing public comment opportunities and proposals from multiple federal agencies into a single resource, the Public Land Comment Hub helps people understand what is being considered and how they can participate in the official process. This is a natural extension of our commitment to creating tools that connect people more deeply with the places they care about."
That framing — knowledge of the land as a form of legitimate expertise — runs through everything onX has done in the advocacy space. Knowledge of the land shouldn't count for less simply because someone doesn't spend their afternoons searching the Federal Register. A guy who has hunted the same national forest drainage for fifteen years knows things about that place that no agency employee in a field office has ever observed. The public comment process is theoretically designed to capture exactly that kind of knowledge. In practice, it rarely does, because the barriers to participation are designed around bureaucratic familiarity rather than land familiarity.
onX's Track Record: More Than Maps
Founded in 2009, onX is a pioneer in digital outdoor navigation, developing software that helps inform, inspire, and empower outdoor recreationists. onX Hunt, onX Offroad, onX Backcountry, and onX Fish make up the company's suite of apps and are built by explorers for explorers.
The company's impact has extended well beyond navigation apps. onX has released an Impact Report detailing a year of expanded public access to recreation, nationwide stewardship, and data-driven advocacy during one of the most pivotal moments for public lands in recent history. The company structured its efforts around three pillars: Philanthropy and Giving, Education and Inspiration, and Advocacy and Action.
In 2025 alone, onX's Adventure Forever Grant Program and other efforts supported projects across 27 states that expanded access and strengthened conservation outcomes, including 72,725 acres of private land enrolled in public access and conservation programs and 4,389 public acres acquired for permanent access and secured in perpetuity.
onX worked with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership to quantify the number of acres of public land that are landlocked and therefore inaccessible to the public, and shared this information with land management agencies and policymakers. Building on a successful first year, onX and Toyota are expanding the Trail Revival Project in 2026, supporting 24 community-led trail restoration efforts nationwide to protect and reopen public land access amid rising outdoor recreation. The company has also partnered with Ford to extend mapping tools to eligible vehicle owners, with the collaboration aimed at helping users "confidently explore trails, dirt roads, and public lands."
onX develops four products: onX Hunt, onX Offroad, onX Backcountry, and onX Fish — each built around a specific outdoor use case, but all sharing the same foundational commitment to accurate, actionable land data. The company has brought together data from numerous federal, state, and county agencies to piece together one of the most accurate maps available today, with all data painstakingly combed through, organized, and verified before it is published.
What It Means for the Guy Who Actually Uses This Ground
It is worth being concrete about what the Public Land Comment Hub means in practical terms for the people it's built for. Consider a rifle hunter in Colorado who has drawn a coveted elk tag in a unit that includes national forest ground. He's put in years of scouting, knows the drainages, knows the roads that access the backcountry. He has no idea that the Forest Service is currently in the middle of a travel management planning process that could close several of those roads permanently — a decision that will be finalized based largely on the comment record the agency accumulates. Under the old system, he might find out about it from a bulletin board at the trailhead, or from another hunter who happened to see a Facebook post. More likely, he wouldn't find out until the decision was done.
With the Comment Hub, that same hunter can zoom in on his unit, see a color-coded overlay indicating an active comment period, click through to read a plain-language summary of what's proposed, note the deadline, and follow a direct link to the agency's official comment portal. He can do all of that in the same session he uses to scout elk locations. The tool lives where he already spends time.
Users can zoom in on the places they hunt, fish, ride, camp, climb, or hike, see what's being proposed, and follow a link directly to the agency documents and official comment portal. That geographic specificity is the key feature. The federal land planning process generates proposals covering specific places, and the people who care most about those places are identified by their physical relationship to that ground. Connecting the proposal to the map is what closes the gap between the two.
onX has also published guidance on how to write effective public comments — not just how to find a comment period, but how to say something substantive enough to actually influence an agency's analysis. The company offers a comprehensive guide on how to write effective public comments for land management plans, emphasizing the importance of being informed, specific, and constructive to influence decisions on recreational access and resource management. That pairing of the Comment Hub with writing guidance reflects a sophisticated understanding of where people actually get stuck. Finding the comment period is one barrier. Knowing what to say once you get there is another.
The Broader Fight for Access and Transparency
The Public Land Comment Hub arrives during a period when the future of federal land management is genuinely unsettled. Recent attempts by lawmakers to strong-arm mass disposals of public land through either legislative or judicial means have brazenly disregarded legal requirements for public comment. But just because Utah Sen. Mike Lee had to pull his hotly contested land grab budget rider in the 11th hour doesn't mean federal land sales won't continue the way they always have — in smaller increments, at the behest of the landowning agency, with the public's notice and input.
The quieter, incremental decisions — the forest plan amendments, the travel management revisions, the special use permit changes — are often where the most consequential access outcomes are actually determined. A trailhead that closes, a motorized route that gets reclassified, a grazing allotment that changes how a drainage is managed during hunting season: none of these make national news, but all of them matter deeply to the people who use that ground. And all of them go through a public comment process that has, until now, been effectively invisible to most of those people.
onX is not the first organization to try to address this problem, but it may be the best positioned to solve it at scale. The company already has millions of active users who are, by definition, engaged with specific public land locations. To bring transparency to public land threats in the House Reconciliation Bill, onX published a map outlining the 500 million-plus acres of public lands in Utah and Nevada targeted for disposal. The jump from that kind of transparency tool to the Comment Hub is a short one — same philosophy, broader application.
The Public Land Comment Hub doesn't guarantee that federal agencies will change their decisions, and onX isn't promising otherwise. It won't stop a bad proposal. It won't make an agency listen. What it will do is make sure that the men and women who have the deepest knowledge of and relationship with these landscapes are no longer systematically absent from the record that agencies are legally required to consider. That's not nothing. In a process where substantive, specific, geographically grounded comments can shape an environmental analysis, filling that void matters.
For anyone who has ever pulled onto a trailhead to find a closure sign and wondered how that happened without anyone they know hearing about it first, the answer has always been the same: the process was public, but finding it required effort most people didn't know to make. onX is changing that equation. Whether the outdoor community shows up to use the tool — and whether they write comments worth reading — is the part that's up to them.
