Congratulations Sapani Lohani, Peter Weisberg, Sarah Null, and Zeb Hogan on a job well done! Our paper "Rapidly Accelerating Deforestation in Cambodia’s Mekong River Basin: A Comparative Analysis of Spatial Patterns and Drivers" was just published today online in the journal Water, and you can view it by clicking HERE. I'm really proud of the job that we did. This paper is part of a special edition in the journal Water that features a wide range of topics about the Lower Mekong. You can view the other papers in the special edition by clicking HERE. All of the papers in Water are open access so I'd encourage you to download them and read them.
Our analysis covered a time period from 1993 to 2017 and saw an accelerating rate of deforestation in Cambodia. This is notable because many tropical countries have seen a slowing of their deforestation rate (such as Brazil). In Cambodia, on the other hand, deforestation rates appear not just to be increasing, but to be rapidly accelerating. This has potential to lead to extinctions of forest-dependent species and may already be having an impact on nutrient cycling in aquatic systems. In our paper we studied four different geographic regions - the entire nation of Cambodia, Cambodia + Srepok, Sesan, and Sekong River Basins extending into Laos and Vietnam, just the Srepok, Sesan, and Sekong River Basin, and the area around the Tonle Sap Lake. We also examined forest loss in protected areas and community forests. We hope that our results will wake the world to the tremendous biodiversity loss that is occurring in this region and encourage land managers and policy makers to take stricter actions to reverse the loss of forests in this region.
The Wonders of the Mekong is a multidisciplinary collaborative project funded by USAID since 2016. Based in Cambodia, the project aims to maintain the ecological, cultural, and economic integrity of the vital Mekong river system through interdisciplinary research, capacity building, and education and outreach. More about the project can be found on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MekongWonders/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/mekongwonders/) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/mekongwonders).
