What harm can a road do? Plenty. Once built, illegal roads let loggers, miners, poachers and landgrabbers into the jungle, and the felling begins.
One of Brazil’s top scientists, Eneas Salati, once said, “The best thing you could do for the Amazon rainforest is to blow up all the roads.” He wasn’t joking. And he had a point.
Mapping ghost roads For this study, my PhD student Jayden Engert and I worked with Australian and Indonesian colleagues to recruit and train more than 200 volunteers. What makes this situation uniquely dangerous for conservation is that the roads are growing fast while remaining hidden and outside government control.
The bad news is that when people do build roads inside protected areas, it leads to about the same level of forest destruction compared to roads outside them. We fed our ghost road discoveries into the index and compared two versions for eastern Borneo, one without ghost road information and one with it. The differences are striking.
Asia-Pacific Biodiversity Conservation Deforestation Environment Indonesia Malaysia Mapping Papua New Guinea Roads
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