For more than a century, the National Wildlife Refuge System has succeeded in conserving irreplaceable ecosystems, even as our nation's population has skyrocketed and urbanization has spread. This extraordinary and vast expanse of lands, now encompassing 542 wildlife refuges across 95 million acres of some of the world's best wildlife habitat, is our gift to the "unborn generations" for whom President Theodore Roosevelt created the refuge system on Pelican Island, Florida, March 14, 1903.