Battambang City Overview
Battambang city is known for its well-planned colonial layout. The city centre is arranged in a gridiron pattern, reflecting its colonial heritage. The main attractions in Battambang city are its French shophouse architecture buildings, the Sangkae river quays, the local cuisine, and the vibrant art scene. It is renowned as the city of art in Cambodia.
The city’s well-thought-out urban planning includes several parks and green spaces that provide recreational areas for residents and visitors. Battambang’s economy is diverse, with agriculture playing a significant role due to the fertile land surrounding the city, which evident on the tree canopy map.
Overview of the data
The very high-resolution global canopy map is the result of various high-detail satellite images stitched together from different temporal phases (2018 to 2020) and processed using an artificial intelligence model to identify trees at a 1-meter pixel-level scale.
The data is publicly available for download. However, I have processed it by clipping the global scale data to just the boundary of Battambang city, not the whole province. Due to the size of the data (650 mb), it may take some time to fully load in your browser, depending on your internet speed. I advise accessing this map on a computer browser rather than a mobile phone. Alternatively, you can try accessing it on Google Earth Engine.
I have made this data available for download. You will find one vector file, which is Phnom Penh Boundary (provided by The Humanitarian Data Exchange) and one raster file, which is this tree canopy height data.
It is the collaboration work between Meta, World Resources Institute, and Land & Carbon Lab. To learn more, head over to Meta’s blog post.
Urban Planning Implications
The potential implications for urbanism include urban tree monitoring, city carbon capture, and identifying tree pockets for conservation or establishing urban parks with existing tree patches. This data can also be used for further analysis of the relationship between green areas in the city and demography and population density. Additionally, benefits of trees and parks in urban areas extend toward improving air quality, reducing the urban heat island effect, enhancing mental and physical well-being, increasing biodiversity, providing recreational spaces, and contributing to stormwater management.
Data Limitation
The data is at a global scale, but not all regions have the same level of accuracy. To define the height data, airborne data is needed, and the majority of the world does not have sufficient coverage of lidar data. Moreover, some part of the regions in the satellite imagery contain blurry images, cloud obstructions, and cloud shadows.
Downloadable data: