Unseen and unregulated: ‘Ghost’ roads carve up Asia-Pacific tropical forests

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The findings bolster a growing momentum toward the development of AI-based road-mapping systems to help conservation biologists and resource managers better keep track of informal and illegal road networks and curb associated deforestation rates.. Some 25 million kilometers of paved roads are expected to be built in just the four decades leading up to 2050 — enough to wrap around the equator more than 600 times.

William Laurance, study co-author and a distinguished research professor at James Cook University in Australia, told Mongabay in an email. “As they proliferate, roads can open up a native forest like a flayed fish.”When planned well, roads can connect communities and markets, supporting economic development.

Using high-resolution satellite images, the team of researchers from Indonesia and Australia worked with more than 200 trained research volunteers to manually map roadways in 1.42 million plots of land, each measuring 1 km2 . Scrutinizing all the images to pick out each road, often amid dense and remote forest, amounted to 7,000 hours of volunteer effort. They then compared their data set with two globally recognized official databases: the Global Roads Inventory Project, and OpenStreetMap.

Source: Holiday News (holidaynews.net)

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