Land Use Change Detection and Prediction in Upper Siem Reap River, Cambodia

Kosal Chim,Jon Tunnicliffe,Asaad Shamseldin,Tetsuji Ota

doi:10.3390/hydrology6030064

Abstract

Siem Reap River has played a crucial role in maintaining the Angkor temple complex and livelihood of the people in the basin since the 12th century. Land use in this watershed has changed considerably over the last few decades, which is thought to have had an influence on river. This study was carried out as part of assessing the land use and climate change on hydrology of the upper Siem Reap River. The objective was to reconstruct patterns of annual deforestation from 1988 to 2018 and to explore scenarios of land use 40 and 80 years into the future. A supervised maximum likelihood classification was applied to investigate forest cover change in the last three decades. Multi-layer perceptron neural network-Markov chain (MLPNN-MC) was used to forecast land use and land cover (LULC) change for the years 2058 and 2098. The results show that there has been a significantly decreasing trend in forest cover at the rate 1.22% over the last three decades, and there would be a continuous upward trend of deforestation and downward trend of forest cover in the future. This study emphasizes the impacts of land use change on water supply for the Angkor temple complex (World Heritage Site) and the surrounding population.

Highlights

The results show that there has been a significantly decreasing trend in forest cover at the rate 1.22% over the last three decades, and there would be a continuous upward trend of deforestation and downward trend of forest cover in the future
Land use and land cover (LULC) change has become a popular topic in recent decades because change in the landscape is linked to so many vital environmental processes [1,2]
The objective of this study is to evaluate land use and land cover (LULC) change trend and annual rate of deforestation from 1988 to 2018 using supervised classification, and to predict future LULC maps for years 2058 and 2098 using the Land Change Modeler (LCM) tool

Summary

Introduction

Land use and land cover (LULC) change has become a popular topic in recent decades because change in the landscape is linked to so many vital environmental processes [1,2]. The most common and widespread LULC changes across the globe are deforestation, agricultural expansion, and urbanization [4,5,6]. The trend in LULC has been toward cash crop plantations due to various government policies, growing physical infrastructure, social, and economic development in various parts of mountainous areas in Southeast Asia. Forests have become the main focus for conversion to agriculture plantation [7]. The mountainous forested areas of Cambodia have been transformed into agricultural land through economic land concessions (ELC). ELC is the process of long-term (usually 70 to 90 years) granting the state-owned land to private sector operations for economic development through agricultural and industrial–agricultural operations, including large-scale plantations, stock rearing, and factory construction [8]. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishery (MAFF)

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