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.