"The road will cause an environmental disaster," 27 biodiversity experts said in a commentary published by the science journal Nature.

They urged the Tanzanian government to look at an alternative route that runs far south of the UN-listed haven.

The planned road slashes right across the annual migratory route taken by 1.3 million wildebeest, part of the last great mass movements of animals on Earth, they said.

The wildebeest play a vital role in a fragile ecosystem, maintaining the vitality of Serengeti's grasslands and sustaining threatened predators such as lions, cheetahs and wild dogs, they said.

In other parks, such as Canada's Banff National Park, Etosha National Park in Namibia and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in Botswana, fences and roads on migratory routes have triggered a collapse in the ecosystem, the scientists said.

"Simulations suggest that if wildebeest access to the Mara river in Kenya is blocked, the population will fall to less than 300,000," they said.

"This would lead to more grass fires, which would further diminish the quality of grazing by volatising minerals, and the ecosystem could flip into being a source of atmospheric CO2."

The idea of linking Tanzania's coast to Lake Victoria and Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo has been around for two decades.

With Tanzania due to stage elections next month, the scheme has gained in priority because of increasing foreign interest in exploiting the mineral wealth of central Africa, the commentary said.

The proposed road would cut a broad swathe 50 kilometres (31 miles) long through the northern part of the 14,763-square-kilometre (5,698-square-mile) Serengeti National Park, close to the border with Kenya.

The alternative route invoked by the experts would be around 250 kilometres farther south, below the Ngorongoro Conservation Area.

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