Forest Roads: A synthesis of scientific information.

U.S.D.A. Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Station

Identify known and hypothesized road-related issues and to summarize the scientific information available about them. The report identifies linkages between processes and effects that suggest both potential compatible uses and potential problems and risks. Generalizations are made where appropriate, but roads issues and road science cannot usually be effectively separated from the specific ecologic, economic, social, and public lands management contexts in which roads exist or are proposed. General Consideration of Road Networks at Intermediate and Large Scales Across a forest or river basin, the access needs, economic dependencies, landscape sensitivities, downstream beneficial uses of water, and so on can be reasonably well defined, but these relations tend to differ greatly from place to place. Road effects and uses may be somewhat arbitrarily divided into beneficial and detrimental. The largest group of beneficial variables relates to access. We identified access-related benefits as harvest of timber and special forest products, grazing, mining, recreation, fire control, land management, research and monitoring, access to private inholdings, restoration, local community critical needs, subsistence, and the cultural value of the roads themselves. Nonaccess-related benefits include edge habitat, firebreaks, the absence of economic alternatives for land management, and the jobs associated with building and maintaining the roads. Undesirable consequences include adverse effects on hydrology and geomorphic features (such as debris slides, sedimentation), habitat fragmentation, predation, road kill, invasion by exotic species, dispersal of pathogens, degraded water quality and chemical contamination, degraded aquatic habitat, use conflicts, destructive human actions (for example, trash dumping, illegal hunting, fires), lost solitude, depressed local economies, loss of soil productivity, and decline in biodiversity.

Forest Roads: A synthesis of scientific information.

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