Mapping Cambodia
Over the course of my project here in Cambodia, one activity which has sucked up a lot of time is the accumulation of spatial data, ranging from paper topographic maps to digital orthophotos. These are invaluable for general thinking about land use, as well as developing landscape histories, which are an important aspect of my research project (as well as not getting lost!). One sort of data which I have yet to properly assemble, are locations of government land and fishing concessions to private individuals, companies and communities.
However, a post from Details are Sketchy drew my attention to Alt.Map.Cambodia. There, one can find Google Maps of fishing, mineral and agricultural concessions (like the map above), documents dealing with border negotiations, and more miscellaneous geographic information. An excellent resource!
Alt.Map.Cambodia subsequently pointed me to the Danida-funded Cambodia Atlas project. The website features an interactive Java-powered map of Cambodia, which allows users to modify which information is displayed on a base map of Cambodia (i.e. which layers of the GIS are active). It includes layers for forest cover, UXO and land mines, community fisheries and much more. Fun to play with. According to the site, this is part of the effort to get this data into the public domain, which is a good thing. However, I am not sure if they are making the datasets available for download so that we can actually use them in our own spatial analyses. That would be a really good thing.
