PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Study shows where on the planet new roads should and should not go

2014-08-28
(Press-News.org) More than 25 million kilometres of new roads will be built worldwide by 2050. Many of these roads will slice into Earth's last wildernesses, where they bring an influx of destructive loggers, hunters and illegal miners.

Now, an ambitious study has created a 'global roadmap' for prioritising road building across the planet, to try to balance the competing demands of development and environmental protection.

The map has two components: an 'environmental-values' layer that estimates that natural importance of ecosystems and a 'road-benefits' layer that estimates the potential for increased agriculture production via new or improved roads.

The authors of the new study, recently published in the journal Nature, write that by combining these layers they have identified areas where new roads have most potential benefit, areas where road building should be avoided, and conflict areas "where potential costs and benefits are both sizable".

"It's challenging but we think we've identified where in the world new roads would be most environmentally damaging," said co-author Professor Andrew Balmford from the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology.

"For particular regions the approach can be improved by adding detailed local information but we think our overall framework is a powerful one."

"Roads often open a Pandora's Box of environmental problems," said Professor William Laurance of James Cook University in Australia, the study's lead author. "But we also need roads for our societies and economies, so the challenge is to decide where to put new roads - and where to avoid them."

Professors Laurance and Balmford worked with colleagues from Harvard, Cambridge, Melbourne, Minnesota and other universities for nearly two years to map out the world's most important ecosystems and biodiversity.

After mapping out the priority areas for conservation, the team then tried to decide where roads would have the greatest benefits for humanity.

In general, areas that would benefit most from new roads are those that have largely converted to agriculture but are currently relatively low-yielding but not too distant from urban markets. All continents have regions that fit this bill - including parts of central Eurasia, Central America and Mexico, and the Atlantic region of South America.

"We focused on agriculture because global food demand is expected to double by mid-century, and new or improved roads are vital for farmers," said Dr Gopalasamy Reuben Clements from James Cook. "With better roads, farmers can buy fertilisers to raise their yields and get their crops to markets with far less cost and waste."

"The good news is that there are still expanses of the world where agriculture can be greatly improved without large environmental costs," said Dr Nathan Mueller of Harvard University, USA.

Areas with carbon-rich ecosystems with key wilderness habitats, such as tropical forests, were identified as those where new roads would cause the most environmental damage with the lease human benefit, particularly areas where few roads currently exist.

"Our study also shows that in large parts of the world, such as the Amazon, Southeast Asia, and Madagascar, the environmental costs of road expansion are massive," said Christine O'Connell from the University of Minnesota, USA.

The authors emphasise that there will be serious conflicts in the coming decades.

"We're facing a lot of tough decisions," said Irene Burgues Arrea of the Conservation Strategy Fund in Costa Rica. "For instance, there are huge conflict areas in sub-Saharan Africa, because it has vital wildlife habitats but a very rapidly growing human population that will need more food and more roads."

The study's authors say that this new global road-mapping scheme can be used as a working model that can be adapted to for specific areas. They say that proactive and strategic planning to reduce environmental damage should be central to any discussion about road expansion.

"We hope our scheme will be adopted by governments and international funding agencies, to help balance development and nature conservation," said Professor Laurance.

"So much road expansion today is unplanned or chaotic, and we badly need a more proactive approach. It's vital because we're facing the most explosive era of road expansion in human history," he said.

Given that the total length of new roads anticipated by mid-century would encircle the Earth more than 600 times, the authors point out that there is "little time to lose".

INFORMATION:


ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Nanoscale assembly line

2014-08-28
This news release is available in German. Cars, planes and many electronic products are now built with the help of sophisticated assembly lines. Mobile assembly carriers, on to which the objects are fixed, are an important part of these assembly lines. In the case of a car body, the assembly components are attached in various work stages arranged in a precise spatial and chronological sequence, resulting in a complete vehicle at the end of the line. The creation of such an assembly line at molecular level has been a long-held dream of many nanoscientists. "It would ...

Paleontology: Oldest representative of a weird arthropod group

2014-08-28
Biologists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have assigned a number of 435-million-year-old fossils to a new genus of predatory arthropods. These animals lived in shallow marine habitats and were far less eye-catching than related forms found in Jurassic strata. Before they sank to the bottom of their shallow marine habitat and were fossilized some 435 million years ago, these arthropods preyed on other denizens of the Silurian seas – although they were not exactly inconspicuous, possessing a bivalved carapace and multiple abdominal limbs. A group of ...

Better classification to improve treatments for breast cancer

2014-08-28
Breast cancer can be classified into ten different subtypes, and scientists have developed a tool to identify which is which. The research, published in the journal Genome Biology, could improve treatments and targeting of treatments for the disease. Cancer arises due to genetic changes which cause normal cells to develop into tumors. As we learn more about breast cancer, we are seeing that it is not one single disease – the mutations in the genes that cause different cancers are not alike, and this is why tumors respond differently to treatment and grow at different ...

New study charts the global invasion of crop pests

New study charts the global invasion of crop pests
2014-08-28
Many of the world's most important crop-producing countries will be fully saturated with pests by the middle of the century if current trends continue, according to a new study led by the University of Exeter. More than one-in-ten pest types can already be found in around half the countries that grow their host crops. If this spread advances at its current rate, scientists fear that a significant proportion of global crop-producing countries will be overwhelmed by pests within the next 30 years. Crop pests include fungi, bacteria, viruses, insects, nematodes, viroids ...

The Lancet journals: Three-quarters of depressed cancer patients do not receive treatment for depression but a new approach could transform their care

2014-08-28
Three papers published in The Lancet Psychiatry, The Lancet, and The Lancet Oncology reveal that around three-quarters of cancer patients who have major depression are not currently receiving treatment for depression, and that a new integrated treatment programme is strikingly more effective at reducing depression and improving quality of life than current care. An analysis of data from more than 21 000 patients attending cancer clinics in Scotland, UK, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, found that major depression is substantially more common in cancer patients than ...

Better health care as important as controlling risk factors for heart health

2014-08-28
Hamilton, ON (August 27, 2014) – Keeping a healthy heart may have as much to do with the quality of health care you have available as it does you avoiding risk factors such as smoking, bad diet and little exercise. A large international study led by researchers at the Population Health Research Institute at McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences has found a that low-income countries which have people with the lowest risk factors for cardiovascular problems have the highest rates of cardiovascular events and death, while the high-income countries of people with ...

Researchers investigating new treatment for multiple sclerosis

2014-08-27
MINNEAPOLIS – A new treatment under investigation for multiple sclerosis (MS) is safe and tolerable in phase I clinical trials, according to a study published August 27, 2014, in Neurology® Neuroimmunology & Neuroinflammation, a new online-only, freely accessible, specialty medical journal. The publication is part of the Neurology® family of journals, published by the American Academy of Neurology. The phase I studies were the first to test the drug candidate in humans. Studies with animals showed that the drug, which is called anti-LINGO-1, or BIIB033, may be able to ...

Bundled approach to reduce surgical site infections in colorectal surgery

2014-08-27
Bottom Line: A multidisciplinary program (called a "bundle") that spanned the phases of perioperative care helped reduce surgical site infections (SSIs) in patients undergoing colorectal surgery (CRS) at an academic medical center. Author: Jeffrey E. Keenan, M.D., of the Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C., and colleagues. Background: SSIs are associated with increased complications, length of hospital stay, readmission rates and health care costs. Efforts that have used systematic approaches, called bundles, that aim to incorporate best practices across the ...

Photodynamic therapy vs. cryotherapy for actinic keratoses

2014-08-27
Bottom Line: Photodynamic therapy (PDT, which uses topical agents and light to kill tissue) appears to better clear actinic keratoses (AKs, a common skin lesion caused by sun damage) at three months after treatment than cryotherapy (which uses liquid nitrogen to freeze lesions). Author: Gayatri Patel, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of California Davis Medical Center, in Sacramento, and colleagues. Background: AKs are rough, scaly lesions on the skin typically found on individuals with fair complexions who have had lots of sun exposure. The lesions have the potential ...

APOE, diagnostic accuracy of CSF biomarkers for Alzheimer disease

2014-08-27
Bottom Line: Cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) levels of β-amyloid 42(Aβ42) are associated with the diagnosis of Alzheimer disease (AD) and (Aβ) accumulation in the brain independent of apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene makeup. Authors: Ronald Lautner, M.D., of Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Sweden, and colleagues. Background: With the emergence of biomarker dementia diagnostics, interest in CSF biomarkers associated with AD, including Aβ42 and tau proteins, is increasing. The APOE gene is the most prominent susceptibility gene for late-onset AD. For the ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Climate crisis could force wild vanilla plants and pollinating insects apart, threatening global supply

Teens report spending 21% of each driving trip looking at their phone

Study explores the ‘social norms’ of distracted driving among teens

Diver-operated microscope brings hidden coral biology into focus

Enhancing the “feel-good” factor of urban vegetation using AI and street view images

A single genetic mutation may have made humans more vulnerable to cancer than chimpanzees

Innovative nanocomposite hydrogel shows promise for cartilage regeneration in osteoarthritis treatment

2025 Guangci Laboratory Medicine Innovation and Development Conference

LabMed Discovery is included in the ICI World Journals database

LabMed Discovery is included in the China Open Access Journal (COAJ) database

Vaccination support program reduces pneumonia-related mortality by 25 percent among the elderly

Over decades, a healthy lifestyle outperforms metformin in preventing onset of Type 2 diabetes

Mental health disorders, malaria, and heart disease most affected by covid pandemic

Green transition will boost UK productivity

Billions voted in 2024, but major new report exposes cracks in global democracy

Researchers find “forever chemicals” impact the developing male brain

Quantum leap in precision sensing across technologies

Upgrading biocrude oil into sustainable aviation fuel using zeolite-supported iron-molybdenum carbide nanocatalysts

For effective science communication, ‘just the facts’ isn’t good enough

RT-EZ: A golden gate assembly toolkit for streamlined genetic engineering of rhodotorula toruloides

Stem Cell Reports announces five new early career editors

Support networks may be the missing link for college students who seek help for excessive drinking

The New England Journal of Medicine shines spotlight on forensic pathology

Scientists discover protein that helps lung cancer spread to the brain

Perceived social status tied to cardiovascular risks in women but not in men

Brain tumor growth patterns may help inform patient care management

This might be America's first campus tree inventory

Emoji use may impact relationship outcomes

Individual merit, not solidarity, prioritized by early childhood education policies

Preclinical study unlocks a mystery of rapid mouth healing

[Press-News.org] Study shows where on the planet new roads should and should not go