West Africa Coastal Road Network for Vulnerability Mapping

West Africa's road infrastructure within 200 kilometers of the coast, extracted from OpenStreetMap in March 2014. This dataset supports coastal vulnerability and risk assessment by providing a spatial inventory of transportation networks. The data is derived from a global, crowdsourced mapping project that is continually updated.

Use Cases

• Modeling exposure of road infrastructure to coastal hazards like sea-level rise
• Assessing accessibility and evacuation routes for coastal communities
• Validating or augmenting other geospatial datasets for West Africa
• Conducting regional infrastructure inventory and planning studies

Strengths

• Spatial scope is clearly defined as a 200km coastal buffer in West Africa
• Derived from OpenStreetMap, a widely-used global crowdsourced base map
• Cross-platform presence (Data.gov, NASA Earthdata) signals recognized utility

Limitations

• Metadata conflicts: last update date differs significantly between sources (2014-12 31 vs. 2026-04-10)
• Critical metadata is missing: no column names, row counts, file size, or license information
• Data is a static snapshot from March 2014 and may not reflect current road networks

Provenance

Source

OpenStreetMap (OSM)

Collection Method

Extracted as a subset from the full OSM dataset based on a 200km coastal buffer.

Time Range

Snapshot from March 2014.

Freshness

2014-12-31 00:00:00

Geography

West Africa, specifically areas within 200 kilometers of the coast.