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African development corridors and their impact on Protected Areas.

The African Development Corridors published by Thorn, J.P.R., Bignoli, D.J., Mwangi, B. et al. The African Development Corridors Database: a new tool to assess the impacts of infrastructure investments. Sci Data 9, 679 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01771-y have been buffered according to the level of intervention (Major road: 15 km, Passenger and freight railway: 10 km, Railway: 5 km, Pipeline: 2,5km). Data obtained was intersected with the country boundaries and with protected areas (WDPA, February 2023 version) obtaining the percentage of PA coverage of corridors in each country.

Original data source: Data Thorn, Jessica P.R.; Mwangi, Ben; Juffe Bignoli, Diego (2022), The African development corridors database 2022, Dryad, Dataset, https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9kd51c5hw Elaboration: Battistella L.(2023).

It is important to note that this study does not include all infrastructure projects in Africa. Instead, the focus was on mapping those infrastructure projects that were under the umbrella of an existing, in progress, or planned development corridor project (or similar term). See the Nature Scientific Data manuscript and methods for further details (Manuscript is In Press). The files available in the compressed zip files are the same version of the database but in different formats: ESRI ArcGIS geodatabase (.gdb) named as "DCDB20210817.gdb", open access Geopackage format (.gpkg) named as "DCDB20210817.gpkg", and non-spatially explicit version of the database in .csv format named as "DCDB_Tabular_CSVs_20210817". Each includes the spatial data with its 22 attribute table, a references table, and a list of non-mapped corridors. The African Development Corridors database can be explored at https://arcg.is/TynL90. It is also publicly available and can be accessed and downloaded through the Development Corridors data portal: https://dcp-unep-wcmc.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/. All the data contained in the database and the database can be used under a CCO 1.0 license. They were digitized by the team using the sources cited in the methods. All sources are acknowledged in the reference table, which is linked to the spatial data by a unique identifier for each project that links the spatial data and the references table. There are several ways to access and download the information contained in the database in the Development Corridors data portal– with options to download the database in CSV with 22 attributes, KML, Shapefiles, or GEOJSON formats. Detailed information about the variables in the database can be found in Supplementary Table 2 of the published paper, which corresponds to the .csv files in the data portal.


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