Protected areas of the United States

The protected areas of the United States are managed by an array of different federal, state, tribal and local level authorities and receive widely varying levels of protection. Some areas are managed as wilderness, while others are operated with acceptable commercial exploitation. As of 2022^[update], the 42,826 protected areas covered 1,235,486 km² (477,024 sq mi), or 13 percent of the land area of the United States.^[2] This is also one-tenth of the protected land area of the world.^{[citation needed]} The U.S. also had a total of 871 National Marine Protected Areas, covering an additional 1,240,000 sq mi (3,200,000 km²), or 26 percent of the total marine area of the United States.^[3]