Investigating the effect of forestry road network development on services to communities in forest villages (case study: Chegeni region of Lorestan province)

In forest areas outside of northern Iran, Establishing forest roads is costly and without revenue, and is often performed by Jihad-e-Sazandegi and Roads and Transport institutions with the purpose of accessing development projects such as dams or electricity transmission, water supply, access to rural areas, etc. Considering the priority of socio-economic issues in western forests of the country, evaluating the impact of forest roads on the development of services in villages is necessary. For this purpose, in the present research, the trend of development of forest road network in the 40s, 80s and 90s was determined by calculating the length of the road and assessing the quality of the pavement. To do this, photographs of the aforementioned decades were obtained from the Mapping Organization of the country and after geometric corrections, the images underwent visual interpretation. Then, by using statistical resources and information about the general census of population and housing, and completed questionnaires for each village, the development of the villages of the study area was estimated via the Z index in the mentioned time intervals. Then, route access and rural development were calculated using Spearman correlation test. The correlation coefficient was obtained 0.738, which shows a direct and significant relationship between access to forest roads and rural development.