This is especially the case in pristine or frontier regions,where new roads often dramatically increase land colonization,habitat disruption, and overexploitation of wildlife and natural resource. It is broadly understood that the best strategy for maintaining the integrity of wilderness areas is by ‘avoiding the first cut’—keeping them roadfree — because deforestation is highly contagious spatially and because new roads tend to spawn networks of secondary and tertiary roads that greatly increase the extent of environmental damage. Unfortunately, new roads are now penetrating into many of the world’s last surviving wildernesses, including the Amazon New Guinea Siberia and
the Congo Basin