Tourism, forest conversion, and land transformations in the Angkor basin, Cambodia

The Angkor basin of Cambodia, the site of the great Angkor temple complex, has experienced explosive tourism growth since the 1993 onset of national political stability and renewed international investment, which in turn has driven increasing demand for water, wood, and biomass fuel, and rapid and extensive land-use and land-cover change. We use multi-temporal Landsat imagery (1989–2005) to describe the rate and extent of land-cover change throughout the Angkor basin. While 50% of the landscape remained in rice agriculture it is notable that a larger proportion of the area was deforested (23.4%) than experienced forest regrowth (4.9%). Most forest loss occurred between the Angkor temple complex and Phnom Kulen National Park, and was due in part to charcoal production to serve the tourist industry, and also conversion to permanent agriculture. The small area of forest increase was concentrated along the eastern boundary of the main Angkor complex. The interplay among global (tourism, climate), regional (national policies, large-river management), and local (construction and agriculture, energy and water sources to support the tourism industry) factors drives a distinctive but complex pattern of land-use and land-cover change.

[1]  E. Lambin,et al.  Proximate Causes and Underlying Driving Forces of Tropical Deforestation , 2002 .

[2]  K. Chomitz,et al.  Roads, land use, and deforestation : a spatial model applied to Belize , 1996 .

[3]  Sven Wunder,et al.  DEFORESTATION AND THE USES OF WOOD IN THE ECUADORIAN ANDES , 1996 .

[4]  John R. Jensen.  Introductory Digital Image Processing , 2004 .

[5]  John F. Richards,et al.  The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution.@@@The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere Over the Past 300 Years. , 1993 .

[6]  Billie Turner,et al.  The human causes of Deforestation in Southeast Asia , 1994 .

[7]  A. LeMaistre,et al.  Analyses and Management Prospects of the International Angkor Programme , 2002 .

[8]  S. Carpenter,et al.  Global Consequences of Land Use , 2005, Science.

[9]  E. Lambin,et al.  Regional Differences in Tropical Deforestation , 2003 .

[10]  Russell G. Congalton,et al.  A review of assessing the accuracy of classifications of remotely sensed data , 1991 .

[11]  R. Jensen,et al.  Growth through greening: developing and assessing alternative economic development programmes , 2002 .

[12]  Andrea E. Gaughan,et al.  SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL LAND-COVER TRANSFORMATION IN THE ANGKOR BASIN: A CHANGING LANDSCAPE IN CAMBODIA, 1989-2005 , 2006 .

[13]  D. Chandler.  A history of Cambodia , 1984, The Journal of Asian Studies.

[14]  S. Wright,et al.  Tropical forests in a changing environment. , 2005, Trends in ecology & evolution.

[15]  R. DeFries,et al.  INCREASING ISOLATION OF PROTECTED AREAS IN TROPICAL FORESTS OVER THE PAST TWENTY YEARS , 2005 .

[16]  Charles M Schweik,et al.  Retrieving Land-Cover Change Information from Landsat Satellite Images by Minimizing Other Sources of Reflectance Variability , 2005 .

[17]  Daming He,et al.  Water Level Response to Hydropower Development in the Upper Mekong River , 2008, Ambio.

[18]  W. Neuman,et al.  Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches , 2002 .

[19]  F. Achard,et al.  A new forest cover map of continental southeast Asia derived from SPOT-VEGETATION satellite imagery , 2004 .

[20]  W. Cohen,et al.  Detection of deforestation and land conversion in Rondônia, Brazil using change detection techniques , 2004 .

[21]  Robert W. Sussman,et al.  Satellite imagery, human ecology, anthropology, and deforestation in Madagascar , 1994 .

[22]  F. Achard,et al.  A Synthesis of Information on Rapid Land-cover Change for the Period 1981–2000 , 2005 .

[23]  Robert Walker,et al.  Theorizing Land-Cover and Land-Use Change: The Case of Tropical Deforestation , 2004 .

[24]  H. Bernard.  Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches , 1988 .

[25]  M. Coe,et al.  Angkor and the Khmer Civilization , 2003 .

[26]  Elinor Ostrom,et al.  Seeing the forest and the trees : human-environment interactions in forest ecosystems , 2005 .

[27]  Philippe Le Billon,et al.  The Political Ecology of Transition in Cambodia 1989–1999: War, Peace and Forest Exploitation , 2000 .

[28]  H. Nagendra,et al.  Land cover change and landscape fragmentation—comparing the utility of continuous and discrete analyses for a western Honduras region , 2004 .

[29]  E. Lambin,et al.  Land-Cover-Change Trajectories in Southern Cameroon , 2000 .

[30]  J. Fox,et al.  Resource Use Dynamics and Land-Cover Change in Ang Nhai Village and Phou Phanang National Reserve Forest, Lao PDR , 2005, Environmental management.

[31]  O. Hofstad.  Woodland deforestation by charcoal supply to Dar es Salaam. , 1997 .

[32]  M. Keskinen,et al.  Socio-economic Analysis of the Tonle Sap Region, Cambodia: Building Links and Capacity for Targeted Poverty Alleviation , 2003 .

[33]  Ronald R Rindfuss,et al.  Developing a science of land change: challenges and methodological issues. , 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[34]  P. Defourny,et al.  Land cover characterization and mapping of continental Southeast Asia using multi-resolution satellite sensor data , 2003 .

[35]  Pilar Casals-Carrasco,et al.  Application of spectral mixture analysis for terrain evaluation studies , 2000 .

[36]  A. Gaughan,et al.  Detecting tropical dry forest succession in a shifting cultivation mosaic of the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico , 2008 .

[37]  D. Carr,et al.  Proximate Population Factors and Deforestation in Tropical Agricultural Frontiers , 2003, Population and environment.

[38]  Roland Fletcher,et al.  Living with heritage: site monitoring and heritage values in Greater Angkor and the Angkor World Heritage Site, Cambodia , 2007 .

[39]  John B. Vogler,et al.  Land-Use and Land-Cover Change in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia , 2005, Environmental management.