Illegal 'ghost roads' are threatening vast areas of rainforest

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-04-11 13:00

Australia; Pacific; International; QLD

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Illegal and informal roads are threatening forests across the tropical Asia-Pacific region, according to Australian research. The roads do not appear on legitimate maps and have been nicknamed 'ghost roads'. The researchers spent 7,000 hours hand-mapping roads, using fine-scale satellite images from Google Earth across more than 1.4 million square kilometres of the Asia-Pacific region. They found ghost roads in these regions to be 3 - 6.6 times longer than all mapped roads put together. They also found that when ghost roads appear, local deforestation soars - usually immediately after the roads are built - and the density of roads was by far the most important predictor of forest loss.