Ghost roads and the destruction of Asia-Pacific tropical forests.

ABSTRACT: Roads are expanding at the fastest pace in human history. This is the case especially in biodiversity-rich tropical nations, where roads can result in forest loss and fragmentation, wildfires, illicit land invasions and negative societal effects^1-5. Many roads are being constructed illegally or informally and do not appear on any existing road map^6-10; the toll of such 'ghost roads' on ecosystems is poorly understood. Here we use around 7,000 h of effort by trained volunteers to map ghost roads across the tropical Asia-Pacific region, sampling 1.42 million plots, each 1 km² in area. Our intensive sampling revealed a total of 1.37 million km of roads in our plots-from 3.0 to 6.6 times more roads than were found in leading datasets of roads globally. Across o

SUBMITTER: Engert JE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11078755 | biostudies-literature | 2024 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature