A research team from the US Geological Survey in Fort Collins, Colorado have published a study in this week's issue of Science that uses a new technique to explore the roadless terrain of USA.
If you were to use a map made by this team, you would see roadless regions looking like mountain peaks. Don't be surprised because the elevations created by these maps represent the distances between that spot and the road. The higher the peak, the greater is the distance between that place and the road.
Summing up their newly created technique of mapping, the investigators write,“Roads encroaching into undeveloped areas generally degrade ecological and watershed conditions and simultaneously provide access to natural resources, land parcels for development, and recreation. A metric of roadless space is needed for monitoring the balance between these ecological costs and societal benefits. We introduce a metric, roadless volume (RV), which is derived from the calculated distance to the nearest road. RV is useful and integrable over scales ranging from local to national”.
If you would like to discuss the paper with Dr Raymond Watts, lead author of this study, you can write to him at rwatts@usgs.gov.
Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5825/736?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=
10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Raymond+Watts&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
Science 4 May 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5825, pp. 736 – 738. DOI: 10.1126/science.1138141. Roadless Space of the Conterminous United States. Raymond D. Watts,1* Roger W. Compton,2 John H. McCammon,2 Carl L. Rich,2 Stewart M. Wright,2 Tom Owens,2 Douglas S. Ouren1
1 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Fort Collins, CO 80526-8118, USA. 2 USGS, Denver, CO 80225-0046, USA.
2 comments:
This is similar to mapping human footprint and ATREE has a similar work done by us. Bhawna Sharma was involved with this.
ATREE did a similar work mapping human footprint.
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