Connecting the Pan-American Highway Through the Darién Gap

This project explores one of the most remote and environmentally complex landscapes in the Americas: the Darién Gap. Stretching between eastern Panama and northwestern Colombia, the region is defined by dense tropical rainforest, immense rainfall, river networks, mangrove wetlands, and low mountain ridges. It is also the one place where the Pan American Highway breaks, leaving a gap between the continents and creating a long standing challenge in both geography and infrastructure planning.

Guided by curiosity about how terrain, climate, and human movement interact, I used ArcGIS cost distance tools to model two potential least cost routes connecting Yaviza, Panama, to northern Colombia. The first corridor leads toward Apartadó, tracing gradual terrain through rolling foothills, while the second moves toward Chigorodó, crossing wetter landscapes and broader floodplains. Both routes reach elevations of roughly 190 meters and span about 155 kilometers, but each interacts with the landscape in a different way.

Technically, this work involved reclassifying slope rasters to represent terrain difficulty and combining them with a water layer that imposed higher travel costs on rivers, wetlands, and flood prone areas. The resulting cost surface allowed the least cost path tools to identify the most efficient routes by favoring gradual slopes and avoiding hydrologic barriers. Elevation profiles and three dimensional scenes revealed how strongly the landscape shapes these paths, with both routes bending away from steep ridges and diverting around river basins and saturated ground.

What I found most compelling in this analysis is how the land itself guides movement. Even without considering human boundaries or settlements, the model naturally gravitates toward the same valleys and gentle slopes that travelers would choose on the ground. At the same time, the project underscored the limitations of purely physical models in a place as socially and environmentally sensitive as the Darién. Protected areas, indigenous territories, biodiversity concerns, security risks, and political constraints define the feasibility of any real world route, reminding me that geography is always both physical and human.

This project reflects my interest in using GIS to understand complex environmental systems and to illuminate how people interact with landscapes that are constantly shaped by climate, terrain, and history. It blends analytical modeling with a deep appreciation for place, revealing how environmental insight and thoughtful mapping can support more responsible and informed decision making.