___________________________________________________________________________________
USGS NATIONAL OVERVIEW ROAD METRICS
Raymond D. Watts
United States Geological Survey
USGS Fort Collins Science Center
The road network of North America has over 6.5 million km of roads, is the largest construction on Earth, and provides easy means for access to nearly every part of the American landscape. Humans using roads bring invasive species with them, so there is much to learn about
road-induced exposure risk. One approach to these studies is development and application
of indicators, which summarize the relative status of roads and of the intervening open space,
providing a basis for comparison between places and times. It is helpful to design indicator
datasets so they can be used easily with other datasets; a first indicator, the National Overview Road Metrics Euclidean Distance (NORM ED) dataset has been designed for ready use
with the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD). NORM ED gives distance to the nearest
road at 30 meter intervals across the nation in an Albers Equal Area projection. USGS is
working on more complex indicators at lower resolution (1 km), and has discovered that
there is a strong correlation between road-derived indicators and ecoregions. USGS would
like to work with other agencies to apply metrics as they are developed and to develop new
metrics, particularly for application to management of resources on public lands.
Workshop Proceedings: Quantitative Techniques for Deriving National Scale Data
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