Siem Reap Overview
Siem Reap is know for its Angkor Archaeological site, which features hundreds of ancient Khmer temples. Amongst these, Angkor Wat stands out as the largest religious monument in the world, attracting millions of tourists annually. Many of these temples are situated within and surrounded by forest cover, making Siem Reap city the greenest city in Cambodia. In the southern part of the city, the Tonle Sap region contains floodplain forests that are also evident in this map data.
The Angkor Thom compound, another significant site within the Angkor Archaeological Park, is enveloped in dense forest. This area includes the Bayond temple, known for its massive stone faces towers, and its surrounded by a vast network of trees that add to the mystique and grandeur of the site. The forests within Angkor Thom are home to variety of wildlife, enhancing the biodiversity of the region.
The abundance of trees in Siem Reap city contributes to its rich biodiversity, providing habitat for various wildlife species. These trees help in maintaining the iconological balance and play a crucial role in attracting tourists from all over the world to visit Siem Reap and Cambodia. The dense forest cover not only enhance the beauty and historical ambience of the temples for also support the local ecotourism businesses.
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 Siem Reap city, not the whole province. Due to the size of the data (550 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: