New Mapping System shows Roadless Areas of Co-terminous USA

[va4wilderness]

This looks pretty interesting:

From "Nature":

A new type of road map, which highlights roadless areas by showing them as mountain peaks, could prove a valuable aid to conservationists — or even to hikers searching for remote corners of the globe.

Researchers can calculate a useful metric called 'roadless volume' from the peaks, which reflects the extent to which a given landscape is carved up by tarmac roads. It's novel in that it measures "the holes in the road network instead of the road network itself," says Raymond Watts of the US Geological Survey in Fort Collins, Colorado, lead author of the study, which is published in this week's Science1.

....
Using digital maps, Watts and his team divided up the United States into about 10 billion squares, each measuring 30 metres across. For the corners of each square, they worked out the distance to the nearest road. This was then mapped as an 'elevation'. The higher the 'peak' in the computerized terrain, the greater the distance between that point and the nearest road.

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070430/full/070430-9.html#B1

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5825/736



"Roadless volume per capita by county is much lower in the eastern states — lowest in Kings County, New York." Science