Effects, Monitoring and Management of Forest Roads Using Remote Sensing and GIS in Angolan Miombo Woodlands

Abstract

Angola’s forests are abundant and highly productive with enormous potential to support local needs and exportation. The forests are well distributed across the country, but the existing road network is generally poor and, in some cases, inappropriate. Based on our previous work examining deforestation patterns and the modeling of primary tree attributes of vegetation types, we proposed forest management zones (MZ) for future planning in Huambo province in Angola. Herein, that same framework is applied for the detection of the existing road network in Huambo and the proposal of alternative routes inside the MZ. We used analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and geographic information systems (GIS) to optimize connectivity among the existing forest plantations and their distance to the closest major cities within the province. We developed road suitability maps based on AHP and GIS to ensure safer driving conditions and contribute to the forest planner’s access to the current plantations. According to the suitability map created, 59.51% of the total area is suitable for road development and is counted in classes 4 and 5 in automatic classification. Parameters such as geology, slope, distance from roads to the railway, soil types, elevation, flow accumulation, and aspect were used. We provide a completed assessment of the state of existing roads and evaluate the safety of the observed road sections based on the AHP method. The calculated weights of the factors were all consistent with the model used (consistency ratio was 0.09 < 0.1). Finally, we proposed the best alternative routes to the existing cities, MZ in miombo woodlands, and forest plantations inside the province. Our findings indicated that flow accumulation, soil type, and geology were the most significant factors impacting road construction. Overall, our framework is an important starting point for further research activities towards developing a spatial decision support system (SDSS) for planning road networks in Angola.

A Study On Measuring An Objective Aspect Score In Forestry Analysis: Example Of Forest Roads And Landslide Areas

“…Abay et al [83] gave maximum points to SE aspect and minimum points to W aspect on the contrary, Bugday and Akay [84] gave maximum points to W aspect and minimum points to SE aspect. Chiteculo et al [86] gave maximum points to NW aspect and minimum points to SE aspect on the contrary, Panchal and Shrivastava [87] gave maximum points to SE aspect and minimum points to NW aspect. Note that one of these studies is about landslides, the other is about forest roads.…”

Tropical mobola plum (Parinari curatellifolia): a full characterization of wood and bark within the scope of biorefineries

“…(above sea level), it has a mean annual temperature of 20°C and rainfall that ranges from 1200 to 1600 mm per annum. The dominant soils are ferrosols, usually found at higher elevations, followed by uvisols, which are more common at lower elevations (Chiteculo et al 2022), with a pH from 5.5 to 6.5 and low nutrient content (Delgado-Matas and Pukkala 2015). The annual relative humidity varies from 60-70% (Ndjamba et al 2021).…”

Towards Bim-Gis Integration for Road Intelligent Management System

“…It is thus perfectly suitable for the characteristics of this type of linear infrastructure (Al-Mansoori et al, 2020;Ojo et al, 2019). The most notable recent advances range from ordinary O&M applications such as pavement condition assessment (Al-Mansoori et al, 2020;Almuhanna et al, 2018;Ojo et al, 2019), traffic management (Sajeed et al, 2021), sustainability (Chiteculo et al, 2022;Picchio et al, 2020), optimisation of transport networks (Bi et al, 2021), or the relation of the landscape to the road (Dang et al, 2019;Martín et al, 2016;Talebi et al, 2019).…”