Hello to all our readers! I am so enthusiastic about starting this journey with FIRELAB again after my long break in India. Since I returned, I have been regularly working on the Global River Obstruction Database (GROD) and framing new research questions. This week, I’d like to share about a small-scale upcoming project which will revolve around spatial analysis of roads and road crossings around inland water surfaces and rivers in protected areas.
As a way to contextualise the potential impacts of road-stream crossings within protected areas, we are developing a spatial analysis of these infrastructure across the globe. The spatial scale of the estimated analysis has not been determined, but will be decided based on data availability. Our first step is to determine road-stream intersections using a geographic information system, and determining how many of these occur within different types of protected areas. We will be drawing on secondary spatial data initially, and potentially evaluating the accuracy of these broader-scale analyses for specific protected areas, such as in the Brecon Beacons National Park, close to us here in Swansea. Our work on road-stream crossings builds on work lead by James here in FIRE Lab and previous works carried out in different parts of the world to better our understanding of road infrastructure impacts on freshwater ecosystems.
Bastin, L., Gorelick, N., Saura, S., Bertzky, B., Dubois, G., Fortin, M. and Pekel, J. (2019). Inland surface waters in protected areas globally: Current coverage and 30-year trends. PLOS ONE, 14(1), p.e0210496.
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