Did Trump admin shrink required grizzly bear habitat from 2,500 acres to 1? What documents show

In June 2026, a rumor spread online that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had shrunk the habitat requirement for grizzly bears from 2,500 acres to just 1 acre. 

The claim circulated on Facebook, Threads and X. Snopes readers searched our website for “grizzly bear habitat decimated” and asked whether Trump was responsible for the alleged reduction.

The claim circulated after news broke in early June 2026 that environmental advocacy groups sued federal agencies over their redefinition of the minimum patch size for a “secure habitat” for grizzly bears. That decision, which did take place, reduced the minimum patch size from 2,500 acres to one acre in certain areas outside a designated grizzly bear recovery zone in Montana’s Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest. 

A “secure habitat” is essentially an area that is free of roads and development that provides ample space for bears to meet their daily foraging needs. The Forest Service calculates the total acreage of grizzly bears’ secure habitats to help inform conservation plans. 

In short, this decision did not affect other national forests where grizzly bears reside, nor is the minimum patch size a legal requirement. Furthermore, other documents suggest the plan was under discussion in 2024 but was finalized in public documents in 2025. As such, it is unclear how much of the plan began under former President Joe Biden. 

Thus, we have rated this claim a mixture of truth, falsehood and undetermined information. 

The lawsuit argues that federal agencies redefined the minimum patch size to artificially inflate the amount of secure habitat available for grizzly bears (PDF pages 37, 46 and 51) and to obscure the effects of a logging and road-building project in the area known as the Larabee Hat Vegetation Project (PDF page 39), which the Forest Service billed as an effort to “improve forest and watershed conditions and address hazardous wildfire fuel loads.” 

The Forest Service said via email that the agency does not comment on pending litigation. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which works closely with the Forest Service on decisions such as these, did not immediately respond to a request for more information. 

It is worth noting that federal agencies have used varying definitions of a minimum acreage size for a grizzly bear’s secure habitat long before both Biden and Trump. In fact, some of the same advocacy groups that filed the 2026 lawsuit also sued in 2023 over a Forest Service plan to log more than 16,500 acres just outside Yellowstone National Park, which the agency justified, in part, via a 10-acre minimum patch size for grizzly bear secure habitats. 

According to court documents, the Fish and Wildlife Service said it had used a 10-acre minimum patch size in the area in question since 2003 (Page 30). The courts ultimately sided with the conservationists, ruling in December 2025 that the Fish and Wildlife Service violated the Endangered Species Act by not using the “best available science” to determine the 10-acre minimum patch size for grizzly bear secure habitats (pages 30-31). 

The same decision stated on Page 36 that scientific evidence suggests grizzly bears need “upwards of 2,000 acres of secure habitat.”

Mountain Journal, a digital environmental magazine, reported that the 10-acre minimum patch size was initially implemented specifically for the Yellowstone landscape project. The outlet said that 10-acre patch size, in that case, aimed to ensure that even small areas that could provide good shelter for wildlife were utilized and recognized. “That was more of a policy matter than a biological determination,” the report reads.

The magazine reported that Chris Servheen, a former grizzly bear recovery coordinator with the Fish and Wildlife Service, said, “Nobody ever thought you could have a grizzly living on 10 acres for a month and a half. That’s not what was intended.”

‘Secure habitat’ redefined in Forest Service documents 

As the 2026 lawsuit contends, a 2021 Forest Service land management plan for Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest stated that even outside the recovery zone, “For this analysis, secure habitat includes areas that are ≥ 500m from any motorized route and that are ≥ 2500 acres in size” (PDF Page 391). 

In a 2024 document assessing the effect of the 2021 plan on grizzly bears, the agency stated that it calculated secure habitat using the previous definition but that “there has been additional discussion regarding the minimum size of secure habitat patches.”

The Forest Service claimed on PDF Page 40 that there is “no single scientifically supported secure habitat benchmark” and that “even small patches of habitat that are more than 500 meters from motorized routes may provide valuable space for grizzly bears to avoid human disturbance, move among different areas of food resources, and use for long-distance connectivity.” 

“Therefore, we also calculated secure habitat without establishing a minimum patch size, as an additional measure of potential security for grizzly bears outside the recovery zone,” the document continued. 

However, data from an April 2025 spreadsheet added in an update to the 2024 document included the words, “GrizzlySecureHab” and “GreaterThanEqualToOneAc” — presumably short for “grizzly secure habitat” and “greater than or equal to 1 acre” (Table 10, PDF Page 39). 

As such, it is unclear when, exactly, the Forest Service determined it would redefine a minimum patch size for a secure habitat. Another April 2025 document from the Forest Service on the Montana forest explained on Page 13 that it would include “both metrics” of the 2,500-acre patches and “small patches of secure habitat” to provide “an overall look at the secure habitat conditions on the Forest outside of the recovery zone.” 

“However, all secure habitat calculated using a patch size greater than or equal to one acre will be used as the metric presented below and used throughout the effects analysis as this is the most conservative approach to identify secure habitat and to not miss any effects to secure habitat that is not included in the 2,500-acre patches,” the document continued. 

Then, in a July 2025 document on the impact of the Larabee Hat Vegetation Project under litigation, the Forest Service appeared to make a blanket statement about secure habitats on PDF Page 10 under “Secure Habitat” (emphasis ours): 

Secure areas have been updated to include any area at least 0.3 miles (500 meters) from all motorized routes or private land boundaries that are equal to or greater than 1 acre in size except those that have been decommissioned and/or naturally revegetated.

That same document determined that the project would not have a significant effect on grizzly bears’ habitat, but it could adversely affect them due to helicopter use (PDF Page 30). 

In sum … 

Forest Service documents indicate that for parts of Montana’s Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, specifically, the agency previously used a 2,500-acre minimum patch size to calculate the total acreage of grizzly bear secure habitats. A 2024 document refers to a discussion on changing that minimum size. By 2025, the Forest Service had made a final decision to reduce the minimum patch size from 2,500 acres to 1 acre outside of the designated recovery zone for grizzly bears. 

As such, the claim references a real decision by the Forest Service but did not consider the scope, size and specific timeline for the decision. 

Sources