Large areas of tropical forest worldwide are used for selective logging which requires extensive road networks to access trees harvested for timber. It is well documented that building roads into intact forest can have consequences for forest ecosystems. This is because they lead to fragmentation and facilitate access for people which can lead to long-term forest degradation or deforestation.
We conducted a study of roads in forests in Central Africa over a period of 30 years. We studied an area of 108,000 square kilometers, which is larger than Sierra Leone. We made some startling findings. The main one is that the vast majority of roads are transient and in fact provide better habitats for the recovery of diverse species of trees than adjacent logged forests. But we also learnt that the recovery of biomass—the total weight of the living trees, which contains their stocks of carbon—on abandoned roads was slow.
These findings provide important evidence for the long-term management of logging road networks in tropical forests. They show that it is important to close roads from further vehicle use after the end of logging operations, but it is a good plan to re-open these same roads for use when the next phase of logging takes place in each area of forest. Our results also show the excellent potential to use the land cleared alongside roads to grow the next crop of timber trees.
