Impact of road construction on forest destruction in Bazoft regio and Bakhtiari province

Construction of road netwok has a great important in every community. In one hand it improves the socio- economic development, on the other hand it has a great influence on destruction of natural resoures and soil erosion. In order to study the impact of road construction on forest, the Bazoft basin, asub-basin of Karoon watershed, was selected in Chahar mahal and Bakhtiari province. For this purpose, the length of all roads and the width of the destructed area were measured. Besides, the road plan in combination with slope, direction, geology and forest typology informations was prepared using GIS. Results indicated that 661.08 ha of natural resources area was destructed by road construction, which contains 420.19 ha of forests, 198.97 ha of rangelands and 41.92 ha of agricultural lands. A total of 101 cases of landslide was assessed along the road network in the studied region. In other words, 6735m of road length (3.8%) has been moved because of landslide.