A tabular dataset from the Government of British Columbia reports the amount of roaded and roadless land area within each ecoregion of the province. The analysis used the provincial Digital Road Atlas as of May 1, 2018, defining roaded areas as those within 500 metres of a road and roadless areas as those beyond 500 metres. Areas are reported in hectares to three significant figures for British Columbia and its constituent ecoregions.
Use Cases
- Modeling habitat fragmentation based on road proximity data.
- Assessing conservation priorities based on roadless area statistics by ecoregion.
- Analyzing regional land-use patterns using the reported area in hectares.
- Validating or updating spatial models of road networks using the 500-metre buffer methodology.
Strengths
- Based on the best available single source of road data for British Columbia, the Digital Road Atlas.
- Analysis methodology is clearly defined, including a 500-metre buffer and specific inclusion/exclusion criteria for road types.
- Reproducible R code is available on GitHub.
- Areas are reported to three significant figures, providing precision for comparative analysis.
Limitations
- Data is based on road network information from May 1, 2018; newer road construction is not reflected.
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
Provenance
- Source
- Government of British Columbia
- Collection Method
- Geospatial analysis of the Digital Road Atlas using a 500-metre buffer.
- Time Range
- Based on road data as of May 1, — 2018.
- Freshness
- Last updated 2026-04-17 15:28:48.857447; freshness should be verified against source road data.
- Geography
- British Columbia, Canada, broken down by ecoregion.