Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Rain Forest Roads

     This Case study shows how GIS has been used to give Socio-spatial information to the country of Brazil to better manage and propagate the Amazonian basin and State lands. Citing manly roads as the primary cause of deforestation by fragmenting the forest into a Dendritic pattern. With the use of Geographic Modeling and methods to determine the true area roads in particular take up in this area. Discovering that State and federal "official roads" only account for .005 km2 of the land of the Amazonian Basin while unofficial or logging roads and agricultural roads account for near .586 km2 of the land. Giving reason to concentrate on the pattern and expansion of these unofficial logging roads. Although these temporary logging roads can quickly be consumed and taken over by the forest they  often allow access from villagers and expansive farms to take root in the land and prevent new growth.
       The map above represents the "dendritic" identified with deforestation and expansion of civilizations, many studies have been done to identify why this method is replicated by humans in the environment. Ariba uses GIS to see if hydro-logical patterns play a role in both the Expansion of logging roads but also density of the Forest. 

Arima, E. Y., & Walker, R. T. (2008). Emergent Road Networks. In The Fragmentation of Space in the Amazon Basin: (6th ed., Vol. 74). N.p.: 2008 American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

4 comments:

  1. I think that it is very intresting how this map mainly cites roads as the primary cause deforestation. How do they know that expanding housing cites is not a leading cause?

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  2. I would think that deforestation for the expansion of both housing and industrial use would be a bigger cause than roads for logging. While logging is the literal chopping down of trees for human use, clearing land for the purpose of expansion is a lot less understandable since the wood isn't all necessarily being taken and used for human consumption.

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  3. I thought it was interesting that roads are a main cause for deforestation but official ones only take up a small portion. How long has this been going on and how much damage has been done within these years?

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  4. I think its important to map out these "unofficial" roads for those people who might work and travel into the Forrest very often, that way they have a map to refer to in case of an emergency if they get lost. I also hope these types of maps are readily available to the community there.

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