Roads and cities represent huge sources of degradation for adjacent ecosystems regarding nutrient cycling, energy, water flow and species composition. In this study we test the hypothesis that distance from roads and cities is associated with habitat loss and fragmentation in the caatinga vegetation--a dry forest to scrub vegetation that covers ca. 736,000 km2 of northeast Brazil. The study sit...

Automatic extraction of roads is a present research topic. Many applications like topographic mapping, navigation applications, or image registration could profit from such algorithms. This paper is concerned with automatic road extraction from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. An approach originally developed for the extraction of roads in rural areas from optical imagery with a ground p...

Earlier work has found that social capital reduces traffic fatality risk (Nagler 2013a, Nagler 2013b). Recognizing that rural areas suffer from high traffic fatality levels despite a perceived high density of communal ties, we explore here whether social capital provides the same protection against traffic risks on rural roads as on urban roads, and what factors might explain differential effec...

The urban road networks of the 20 largest German cities have been analysed, based on a detailed database providing the geographical positions as well as the traveltimes for network sizes up to 37,000 nodes and 87,000 links. As the human driver recognises travel-times rather than distances, faster roads appear to be ‘shorter’ than slower ones. The resulting metric space has an effective dimensio...

JT00127539 Document complet disponible sur OLIS dans son format d'origine Complete document available on OLIS in its original format CEMT/CM(2002)11/FINAL 2 Although still far from satisfactory, more progress has been made on road safety on motorways and urban roads over the past 20 years than on country roads. Rural roads are defined as roads outside urban areas that are not motorways or unpav...