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even parks and reserves In the Asia Pacific region, you are completely safe from illegal roads. But protecting parks works. Protected areas had only one-third as many roads as nearby unprotected land.
The bad news is that when people build roads inside protected areas, the level of deforestation is almost the same compared to roads outside protected areas.
Our findings suggest that limiting roads and associated destruction inside protected areas is essential. If satellite imagery can be used to find these roads, authorities can do the same. When illegal roads are discovered, they can be discarded or at least mapped out and managed as legal roads.
With more than 3,000 protected areas already designated, keeping existing protected areas intact is especially urgent. Miniaturized or degraded Globally for new roads, mines and local land use pressures.
Illegal roads cause destruction worldwide, from carbon emissions from burning Amazon forests for cattle grazing, to road construction and deforestation in Central Africa, to poaching of rare animals such as forest elephants killed by poachers near roads in the Congo Basin. causes .
Our impact on the planet varies depending on location. To measure how much influence we have, researchers use: human footprint indexIt integrates data on human activities such as roads and other infrastructure, land use, night lighting in electric habitats, etc.
not mapped
You can use the index to create a heat map showing where human impact is most or least present.
We indexed ghost road discoveries and compared the two versions for eastern Borneo. Without ghost road information And one with that. The difference is amazing.
Including ghost roads in mapping human impacts in eastern Borneo would double the size of areas with “very high” human disturbance and halve areas of low disturbance.
Researchers investigating other developed areas rich in biodiversity, such as Amazonia and Congo Basin We also found many illegal roads in the area that were not marked on maps.
Ghost roads seem to be an epidemic. Worse, these roads may be actively encouraged by aggressive infrastructure expansion plans. China’s Belt and Road InitiativeWe are currently active in over 150 countries.
Destruction
Currently, ghost road mapping is very labor intensive. You might think AI could do this task better, but it doesn’t yet. The human eye still outperforms image recognition AI software for road mapping.
At the current rate of work, it would take approximately 640,000 man-hours (or 73 person-years) to visually map every road (legal and illegal) on the surface of the Earth just once.
Given these difficulties, our group and other researchers We are currently testing AI methods to provide accurate, global-scale mapping of ghost roads in near real-time. Nothing else can keep up with the current surge in road avalanches.
We urgently need the ability to accurately and frequently map the world’s roads. Once you have this information, you can make it public so that authorities, NGOs and researchers involved in forest protection can see the current situation.
Without this important information, we are blind. Knowing what is happening in the rainforest is the first step to stopping its destruction.
This author
Bill Laurance is a former Australian Laureate and Director of the Center for Tropical Environment and Sustainability Science at James Cook University.
