Tokma and Vershina Khandy Villages’ Informal Road Networks, Irkutsk Oblast, Russia, 2019-2023

Hydrocarbon and timber industries are rapidly developing informal road networks in Siberian boreal forests, or taiga. Informal roads are undocumented, often unpaved roads, not maintained by governments, inclusive of local trails to wide industrial easements. Remote communities use informal roads for subsistence hunting, foraging, inter-community and market access. These two shapefiles delineate the modern extent of informal roads surrounding Indigenous Evenki villages of Tokma and Vershina Khandy in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia. These informal road networks were mapped based on interviews and mobile ethnographies that informed a student-run crowdsourced mapping event, or “mapathon,” to digitize the roads from high-resolution 2010s Worldview satellite imagery.