The construction of roads near protected forest areas alters ecosystem function by creating habitat fragmentation and through several direct and indirect negative effects such as increased pollution, animal mortality through collisions, disturbance caused by excessive noise and wind turbulence. Noise in particular may have strong negative effects on animal groups such as frogs and birds, that r...

This study developed a methodology for generating good alternative locations for road networks using heuristic solution techniques. Locations for road networks are determined based on road standards, timber harvesting and transportation costs, and topographic conditions. The main access road route is designed first and then single stand access roads are located as branches. A Genetic Algorithm ...

The Brazilian Amazon in the past decades has been suffering severe landscape alteration, mainly due to anthropogenic activities, such as road building and land clearing for agriculture. Using a high-resolution time series of land cover maps (classified as mature forest, non-forest, secondary forest) spanning from 1984 through 2011, and four uncorrelated fragmentation metrics (edge density, clum...

The impacts of potential linear barriers such as roads, highways, and power lines on rainforest fauna are poorly understood. In the central Brazilian Amazon, we compared the frequency of local movements (<300 m long) of understory birds within intact forest and across a 30-to 40-m-wide road over a 2-year period. Rainforest had regenerated along some road verges, to the extent that a nearly comp...

a Forest Resources Management, University of British Columbia, 2424 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada b NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre, Biospheric Sciences Branch Code 618, Bld 33, #G310, 8800 Greenbelt Road, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA c College of Forestry, Oregon State University, 231 Peavy Hall, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA d Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada, 506 West Bur...

The objective of the study is to evaluate the impact of forest transition on non-timber forest product (NTFP) harvesting in Central Africa. We analyze the evolution of several parameters, including distance from NTFP harvest site to road, proportion of dietary intake and villagers’ incomes. The research is based on field surveys, participatory mapping and the geolocation of activities in three ...

A set of GIS tools has been developed (Road Sediment Analysis Model, RSAM) to analyze and quantify the impacts of forest roads on forested watersheds. RSAM is organized into three modules. In the first module sediment production for each road segment is calculated from slope, length, road surface condition and road side drain vegetation. A GPS gathered road condition inventory provides surface ...

Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Great Lakes Forestry Centre, 1219 Queen Street East, Sault Ste. Marie, ON P6A 2E5, Canada, Northern Research Station, USDA Forest Service, 1992 Folwell Ave, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA, Southern Research Station, Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center, USDA Forest Service, 3041 Cornwallis Road, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA, ...

Forest degradation in the tropics is often associated with roads built for selective logging. The protection of Intact Forest Landscapes (IFL) that are not accessible by roads is high on the biodiversity conservation agenda, a challenge for logging concessions certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). A frequently advocated conservation objective is to maximise the retention of “roadle...