New Survey Maps Roadless Areas Of U.S.

"In the continental United States, roads are never more than a reassuring 22 miles away. Their ubiquity makes travel and transport convenient for people, but it can also fragment or destroy wildlife habitats, help introduce invasive species, and contribute to pollution."

"The further an environment is from a road, the less it is affected by those things. But traditional tools for analyzing roadless space have ranked a plot of land one mile from a road the same as one several miles from a road."

"Researchers compiled roadless space data in 100-foot intervals, county-by-county, across the 48 contiguous United States."

"And when the scientists compared the roadless space with the number of people in a given area, they sometimes found a mismatch: that is, too many roads for too few people."