Wyoming road age and traffic volume estimated with machine learning and graph theory

We provide a roads dataset that includes the spatial location of roads, the estimated age of each road, and the predicted traffic volume of each road between 1986 and 2020 in Wyoming, USA. Our annual estimates of traffic volume are available for each road and include estimates for all vehicles and truck only traffic. Moreover, we provide the estimated age of each road, where a minimum value of 1986 indicates that the road existed in 1986, and any later year indicates the most likely year that road was developed. This dataset will be beneficial for any research focused on the mechanistic effects of road traffic on wildlife populations. Our roads dataset is based on a comprehensive inventory of paved and unpaved roads in Wyoming of 2015 National Aerial Imagery Program (NAIP) aerial imagery (Fancher et al. 2023). We developed annual estimates of road age and vehicular traffic volume across 147,108 km of highways, arterials, collectors, local, and gravel/graded roads within the state of Wyoming. To assign road age, we leveraged a suite of ancillary data on surface disturbances (e.g., oil and gas drilling operations, wind turbines, and open pit mines) with known establishment dates. Then, we predicted traffic volume for each year across Wyoming using XGBoost, a novel machine learning method, to relate ongoing traffic monitoring by the Wyoming Department of Transportation with a separate set of spatial covariates hypothesized to explain traffic patterns across large regions.