Effects of armed conflict on forest cover and vegetation seasonality in Cambodia

Abstract: Armed conflicts have definitive wide-ranging and diverse impacts on the environment. This thesis examines associations between conflict and land cover change in Cambodia, focusing on the last decade (1989 - 1998) of a thirty-year long Civil War. This was done by comparing trends in forest cover and vegetation seasonality between two regions of Cambodia; one conflict zone, and one no-conflict zone, as well as comparing trends over conflict and post-conflict periods. A satellite-based remote sensing approach of changes in the maximum and integrated normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was used to construct time-series and perform regression analysis for both zones on a provincial level. Maximum NDVI was used to classify forest cover, while the integrated NDVI was used to define vegetation seasonality. The results show that trends in forest cover and vegetation seasonality were not significantly different between the conflict and no-conflict zones during the conflict. Vegetation seasonality in the conflict zone increased significantly after the conflict, and significantly more so than in the no-conflict zone.