Study of Brazilian Amazon shows 50,000 km of road was built in just three years

Terra Daily via SPX: Although road-building is a major contributor to deforestation and habitat loss, the way in which road networks develop is still poorly understood. A new study is among the first to measure the number of roads built in a rainforest ecosystem over an extended period of time.

It was published this month in the journal Regional Environmental Change by researchers including two Life Scientists from Imperial College London. They say studies like this will help combat future deforestation by allowing for more accurate predictions of where it might occur.

Even though roads often occupy less than 2 per cent of a country's land surface, they may have an ecological impact on an area up to ten times as large. These indirect effects can include changes in air and soil temperature and moisture, as well as restrictions on the movement of animals.

Research co-author Dr Rob Ewers, of Imperial's Department of Life Sciences, said: "Knowing where the roads are and the speed at which they are built is key to predicting deforestation. A number of models currently exist which rely on this knowledge, but there are no good studies of how quickly roads get built and where they go when they are built. An understanding of road networks is the big missing gap in our ability to predict the future of this region."...

The BR-174 in Roirama, Brazil, shot by Agencia CNT de Noticias, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license