Road and Settlement Maps for Northern Ecuadorian Amazon (1990-2002)

Northern Ecuadorian Amazon geospatial data includes road networks, four major city boundaries, and primary community locations circa 2002. The dataset was created by ORNL_CLOUD, with road data originally digitized from 1990 topographic maps and later updated using 1999 and 2002 remote sensing and field observations. It is distributed across multiple platforms as three compressed files.

Use Cases

• Analyzing road network expansion and its relationship to settlement patterns using digitized road lines and community point locations.
• Mapping urban and community boundaries for demographic or ecological studies of the northern Oriente region.
• Assessing changes in road surface attributes over time by comparing 1990 map data with 1999-2002 field observations.

Strengths

• Road network attributes were updated based on later remote sensing and field observations from 1999 and 2002, improving accuracy.
• Original road data was digitized from standardized 1:50,000 scale topographic maps.
• Cross-platform presence on NASA EarthData and Data.gov indicates established provenance and importance for research.

Limitations

• Column names and specific row/feature counts are not provided by any source, limiting detailed analysis.
• Sources conflict on the last updated date: one lists 2002-12-31, while others list 2026-03-13 (likely a metadata ingestion artifact).
• Data is provided only in compressed file formats; internal data structure is unspecified.

Provenance

Source

ORNL_CLOUD

Collection Method

Digitized from 1:50,000 scale topographic maps (1990), with updates from remote sensing and field observations (1999, 2002).

Time Range

1990-2002

Freshness

2002-12-31

Geography

Northern Ecuadorian Amazon (northern Oriente), bordering the Andes Mountains, containing headwaters of the Amazon River.