Discover the impact of traffic on natural areas with our new global dataset

Have you ever wondered how many vehicles pass through your favourite recreation area or nature reserve? This question can now be answered with our new global dataset on extra-urban road traffic volumes.

by Adrienne Grêt-Regamey

Road traffic has significant ecological and environmental impacts, especially on roads outside cities (i.e. extra-urban roads) that pass or intersect natural areas. Although ecological and environmental studies often consider the presence of roads, they rarely account for road traffic volumes as such data is often incomplete or unavailable. At the ETH Zurich Chair of Planning of Landscape and Urban Systems we have therefore developed a global time-series of road traffic volumes on all extra-urban major roads for the years 1975, 1990, 2000 and 2015.
Using machine learning techniques and network analyses, we combined several global datasets with a large collection of empirical traffic counts to predict traffic volumes for these years. We hope this dataset will increase the inclusion of traffic volume in ecological and environmental research.
The dataset is described in our new publication in Scientific Data (external page www.nature.com/articles/s41597-024-03287-z) and the dataset can be downloaded via the ETH Research Collection (www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/666313).
 

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