Evaluating the ability of community‐protected forests in Cambodia to prevent deforestation and degradation using temporal remote sensing data

Community forests are known to play an important role in preserving forests in Cambodia, a country that has seen rapid deforestation in recent decades. The detailed evaluation of the ability of community‐protected forests to retain forest cover and prevent degradation in Cambodia will help to guide future conservation management. In this study, a combination of remotely sensing data was used to compare the temporal variation in forest structure for six different community forests located in the Phnom Kulen National Park (PKNP) in Cambodia and to assess how these dynamics vary between community‐protected forests and a wider study area. Medium‐resolution Landsat, ALOS PALSAR data, and high‐resolution LiDAR data were used to study the spatial distribution of forest degradation patterns and their impacts on above‐ground biomass (AGB) changes. Analysis of the remotely sensing data acquired at different spatial resolutions revealed that between 2012 and 2015, the community forests had higher ...