Version 1
: Received: 1 July 2024 / Approved: 2 July 2024 / Online: 2 July 2024 (09:50:30 CEST)
How to cite:
Chea, M.; Fraser, B. T.; Nay, S.; Sok, L.; Strasser, H.; Tizard, R. A Survey of Changes in Grasslands within the Tonle Sap Lake Landscape: 2004–2023. Preprints2024, 2024070174. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202407.0174.v1
Chea, M.; Fraser, B. T.; Nay, S.; Sok, L.; Strasser, H.; Tizard, R. A Survey of Changes in Grasslands within the Tonle Sap Lake Landscape: 2004–2023. Preprints 2024, 2024070174. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202407.0174.v1
Chea, M.; Fraser, B. T.; Nay, S.; Sok, L.; Strasser, H.; Tizard, R. A Survey of Changes in Grasslands within the Tonle Sap Lake Landscape: 2004–2023. Preprints2024, 2024070174. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202407.0174.v1
APA Style
Chea, M., Fraser, B. T., Nay, S., Sok, L., Strasser, H., & Tizard, R. (2024). A Survey of Changes in Grasslands within the Tonle Sap Lake Landscape: 2004–2023. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202407.0174.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Chea, M., Hillary Strasser and Rob Tizard. 2024 "A Survey of Changes in Grasslands within the Tonle Sap Lake Landscape: 2004–2023" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202407.0174.v1
Abstract
The Tonle Sap Lake (TSL) landscape is a region of vast natural resources and biological diversity in the heart of Southeast Asia. In addition to serving as the foundation for a highly productive fisheries system, this landscape is home to numerous globally threatened species. Despite recognition by several governmental and international agencies for decades, nine protected areas have been established within this region, natural landcover such as grasslands have experienced considerable declines since the turn of the century. This project used local expert knowledge to train and validate a random forest supervised classification of Landsat satellite imagery in Google Earth Engine. The time series of thematic maps was then used to quantify the conversion of grasslands to croplands between 2004 and 2023. The classification encompassed a 10-kilometer buffer surrounding the landscape, an area of nearly 3 million hectares. The average overall accuracy for these thematic maps was 82.5% (78.5% - 87.9%), with grasslands averaging a 76.1% user’s accuracy. The change detection indicated that over 207,281 ha of grasslands were lost over this period (> 59.5% of the 2004 area), with approx. 89.3% of this loss could be attributed to cropland expansion. The results of this project will inform conservation efforts focused on local scale planning and management of commercial agriculture.
Keywords
Grasslands; Tonle Sap Lake; Land Use and Land Cover; Land Cover Change; Protected Areas; Google Earth Engine; Agriculture Expansion
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Ecology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
