ArticleNature communications2026
The changing surface of the world's roads.
Article in Nature communications, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Resilient road infrastructure is a cornerstone of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), yet spatially consistent information on road surface conditions at the global scale remains limited. We overcome this gap based on a deep learning framework that extracts both road pavedness and road width from Planetscope satellite imagery. Thereby, mapping 95.5% of 9.2 million km of critical arterial roads for 2020 and 2024, nearly half of which was previously unclassified.The resulting dataset and multi-scale analytical framework enable assessments of road infrastructure in the context of development, climate adaptation, and equity.Unlike proxies such as nighttime lights, the data directly captures the physical infrastructure underpinning resilience at higher spatial resolution.This dataset reveals a multi-scale geography of human development, capturing infrastructure investment and accessibility at the planetary scale, enabling a global Humanitarian Passability Matrix for humanitarian logistics, while also providing local insights into road disparities-for example, revealing governance-related patterns in Ghana and highlighting climate-related vulnerabilities in Pakistan.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.