FAO initiative brings global land cover data under one roof for the first time

A press release from FAO: A new FAO database released today collects previously scattered and unharmonized land cover information from around the globe into one centralized database, marking a major improvement in information regarding the physical characteristics of the Earth's surface.

Up to now, one of the major challenges to getting a good global overview of land cover - e.g. how much land is covered by croplands, trees or forests, bare soils, etc. - has been the fact that different countries and organizations go about identifying, measuring and recording such data in diverse ways.

But for FAO's new Global Land Cover SHARE database (GLC-SHARE), data pulled from multiple sources and partners was quality-controlled and harmonized using internationally accepted definitions and standards, bringing a wealth of country-level information into one consolidated dataset spanning the entire planet.

Applications of the new GLC-share database include monitoring of global land cover trends, evaluating the suitability of land for various uses, assessing the impact of climate change on food production, and land-use planning. "A strong understanding of our planet's land cover is essential to promoting sustainable land resources management - including agricultural production to feed a growing population - that makes efficient use of increasingly scarce natural resources yet safeguards the environment," said John Latham, of FAO's Land and Water Division....

A farm in Azna, Iran, shot by Hamid Soufi, public domain 

Asia-Pacific failing to save forests and grasslands

Stian Reklev in Reuters: Asia-Pacific nations are failing to halt the loss of natural forests and grasslands, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Tuesday, robbing people of their livelihoods and worsening environmental problems like desertification and climate change.

Forests and grasslands make up 58 percent of the region's land mass, but each year 2 million hectares (20,000 square kms) are degraded and rendered useless, Patrick Durst, a FAO senior forestry officer told a food conference in Ulan Bator.

Across the Asia-Pacific, 400 million hectares (4 mln sq kms) - an area equal to the combined size of India and Myanmar - are now in bad need of restoration, he said. "We are already seeing strong negative impacts," Durst told Reuters at the conference.

In China and Mongolia, over-grazing and poor land management mean herders increasingly have to give up feeding their livestocks and instead look for new jobs in fast-growing cities. Lost grassland boosts desertification and helps cause massive sand storms that sometimes carry as far as eastern Canada....

A lone tree in Mongolia, shot by tiarescott, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Fertilization destabilizes global grassland ecosystems

University of Minnesota News: A new study led by University of Minnesota researchers demonstrates that fertilization of natural grasslands -- either intentionally or unintentionally as a side effect of global farming and industry -- is having a destabilizing effect on global grassland ecosystems. Using a network of natural grassland research sites around the world called the Nutrient Network, the study represents the first time such a large experiment has been conducted using naturally occurring sites.

Led by Yann Hautier, a Marie Curie Fellow associated with both the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota and the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, the research team included U of M associate professors Eric Seabloom and Elizabeth Borer, and research scientist Eric Lind, along with scientists from institutions around the world including Andy Hector at Oxford University's Department of Plant Sciences. The findings were published on February 16 in the journal Nature.

The researchers found that plant diversity in natural ecosystems creates more stable ecosystems over time because of less synchronized growth of plants. "This is sometimes called the portfolio effect," says Seabloom. "If you have money in two investments and they’re both stocks, they’re going to track each other, but if one is a stock and one is a bond, they’re going to respond differently to the overall economy and are more likely to balance each other."

The researchers collected plants from each of the sites, then sorted, dried, and weighed them to monitor the number of species of plants and total amount of plants, or "biomass," grown over time. They used this information to quantify species diversity and ecosystem stability. Says Hautier: "It was really striking to see the relationship between diversity and stability" and the similarities to data collected from artificial grasslands as part of a research effort called BioDepth, indicating that the results from natural grasslands of the Nutrient Network could be predicted from the results of artificial grasslands.

"The results of our study emphasize that we need to consider not just how productive ecosystems are but also how stable they are in the long-term, and how biodiversity is related to both aspects of ecosystem functioning," says Andy Hector....

Short-grass prairie along the front range of the Rockies, south-central Colorado, as seen from Interstate 25. Shot by Nicholas A. Tonelli fr, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

Savanna vegetation predictions best done by continent

North Carolina State University Newsroom: A “one-size-fits-all” model to predict the effects of climate change on savanna vegetation isn’t as effective as examining individual savannas by continent, according to research published in Science this week.

Savannas – grasslands dotted with trees – cover about 20 percent of the earth’s land and play a critical role in storing atmospheric carbon, says Dr. William Hoffmann, associate professor of plant and microbial biology at North Carolina State University and co-author of the study.

A single global model can't predict savanna tree density as well as continent-specific models, according to research published in Science this week.

A single global model can’t predict savanna tree density as well as continent-specific models, according to research published in Science this week. Photo of a South African savanna courtesy of Dr. William Hoffmann, a co-author of the study.

“We wanted to find out what controls savanna vegetation – essentially the density of trees within the savanna – and whether we can use a single global model to predict what will happen to savannas if global temperatures rise,” Hoffmann said. “We found that the rules determining tree density are fundamentally different among the three continents studied – Africa, Australia and South America. That means a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach won’t work.”

…“For example, greater moisture availability – a combination of rainfall, rainfall seasonality and drought indices – meant greater tree density in Africa and Australia, but it had almost no relationship with tree density in South America,” Hoffmann said.

Not surprisingly, he added, the study showed that fire reduces tree density. But the researchers found some strong counter-intuitive relationships between rainfall and fire frequency, namely that more moisture meant more fires. Hoffmann explained that more rainfall in a savanna meant faster-growing grasses, which meant any fires in that savanna would have ample fuel to spread quickly and easily…

A grassland in Slovenia, shot by Eleassar, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Trends in climate change show need rangeland adaptation

Drovers Cattle Network: ...The journal Rangeland Ecology & Management presents two companion articles that identify trends and projections for climate change and assess mitigation and adaptation strategies to cope with pending change. These articles offer an objective assessment of climate trends and contingency planning as it relates to North American rangelands.

The authors assess three main components of climate change: rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, atmospheric warming, and altered patterns of precipitation.  Climate models project that the southwest and southern plains of the United States will become warmer and drier. The Great Basin will become warmer and drier during summer and experience less snowpack in winter. The northern United States and southern Canada are predicted to become warmer and wetter.

Continued increases in greenhouse gas concentrations will modify fire regimes, soil carbon content, forage quantity and quality to affect livestock, plant community composition, and the distribution of plant and animals. This, in turn, will affect the ability of rangelands to provide ecosystem services and livelihoods for human populations.

Humans can take steps to mitigate the effects of global warming, adapt to minimize negative impacts, and transform rangeland systems to provide alternative ecosystem services with different management practices and expectations. An assessment of climate change projections and strategies to mitigate and adapt to these changes will increase future preparedness. For example, the authors contend that rangeland carbon sequestration is not an economically viable mitigation strategy. Adaptation strategies, including changing perceptions of risk, greater flexibility in production systems, and modification of institutions and policies to emphasize climatic variability, rather than consistency, will be much more viable.

Rangeland professionals are in a position to provide leadership on the challenges of climate change. Increasing awareness of and preparedness for climatic variability will promote both the supply of ecosystem services and the maintenance of human livelihoods well into the future....

Cow photo by Brian Thomas, public domain

Overgrazing turning parts of Mongolian Steppe into desert

Oregon State University News & Communications: Overgrazing by millions of sheep and goats is the primary cause of degraded land in the Mongolian Steppe, one of the largest remaining grassland ecosystems in the world, Oregon State University researchers say in a new report.

Using a new satellite-based vegetation monitoring system, researchers found that about 12 percent of the biomass has disappeared in this country that’s more than twice the size of Texas, and 70 percent of the grassland ecosystem is now considered degraded. The findings were published in Global Change Biology.

Overgrazing accounts for about 80 percent of the vegetation loss in recent years, researchers concluded, and reduced precipitation as a result of climatic change accounted for most of the rest. These combined forces have led to desertification as once-productive grasslands are overtaken by the Gobi Desert, expanding rapidly from the south.

Since 1990 livestock numbers have almost doubled to 45 million animals, caused in part by the socioeconomic changes linked to the breakup of the former Soviet Union, the report said. High unemployment led many people back to domestic herding.

The problem poses serious threats to this ecosystem, researchers say, including soil and water loss, but it may contribute to global climate change as well. Grasslands, depending on their status, can act as either a significant sink or source for atmospheric carbon dioxide...

Two shepherds in Mongolia, shot by JaapV, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Research reveals catastrophic loss of Cambodia’s tropical flooded grasslands

A press release from the University of East Anglia: Around half of Cambodia’s tropical flooded grasslands have been lost in just 10 years according to new research from the University of East Anglia. The seasonally flooded grasslands around the Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia’s largest freshwater lake, are of great importance for biodiversity and a refuge for 11 globally-threatened bird species. They are also a vital fishing, grazing, and traditional rice farming resource for around 1.1 million people.

Research published today in the journal Conservation Biology quantifies for the first time the area’s catastrophic loss of tropical flooded grassland.  The grassland area spanned 3349 km² in 1995, but by 2005 it had been reduced to just 1817 km² – a loss of 46 per cent.

Despite conservation efforts in some areas, it has continued to shrink rapidly since, with a further 19 per cent lost in four years (2005-2009) from the key remaining grassland area in the southeast of the Tonle Sap floodplain.

Factors include intensive commercial rice farming with construction of irrigation channels, which is often illegal. Some areas have also been lost to scrubland where traditional, low-intensity agricultural activity has been abandoned….

Tonle Sap lake in Cambodia, shot by 松岡明芳, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Fighting fire in Africa

Joe DeCapua in Voice of America: In African savannahs, or grasslands, wildfires can either be destructive or beneficial. It all depends on when those fires occur. Scientists at the World Agroforestry Center have developed a system to determine the best time to set the savannahs ablaze.

Savannahs stretch across many parts of Africa. But scientists concentrated their research on grassland conditions similar to the Sahel and South Sudan. When wildfires spread uncontrolled, the heat and flames can cause damage on several levels.

“Many components of the ecosystem can be affected. The biodiversity itself, the soil composition and structure and gas emission and greenhouse gas emission into the atmosphere,” said Cheikh Mbow, senior climate change scientist with the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, Kenya.

“Fire is seen as one of the biggest drivers of deforestation in some ecosystems. And it contributes widely to the reduction of the ecosystem services, which [are] the basis of most of the livelihoods in Africa in poverty conditions. So we are worrying about fire because of the many impacts and implications for the human beings.” Fires in savannahs are common.

“If you look at African images from [a] satellite in the dry season, it appears that most of the ecosystem, which has some level of dryness, will have fires on a regular basis. There have been many attempts in the past, since colonial time actually, to, sort of, ban fire in our ecosystem, but they never succeeded. They never succeeded because fire is a tool,” said Mbow....

Aftermath of a fire in Tanzania, shot by Nevit Dilmen, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Why some grasses got better photosynthesis

Brown University News: Even on the evolutionary time scale of tens of millions of years there is such a thing as being in the right shape at the right time. An anatomical difference in the ability to seize the moment, according to a study led by Brown University biologists, explains why more species in one broad group, or clade, of grasses evolved a more efficient means of photosynthesis than species in another clade.

Biologists refer to the grasses that have evolved this better means of making their food in warm, sunny, and dry conditions with the designation “C4.” Grasses without that trait are labeled “C3.” What scientists had already known is that while all of the grasses in the BEP and PACMAD clades have the basic metabolic infrastructure to become C4 grasses, the species that have actually done so are entirely in the PACMAD clade. A four-nation group of scientists wondered why that disparity exists.

To find out, Brown postdoctoral researcher and lead author Pascal-Antoine Christin spent two years closely examining the cellular anatomy of 157 living species of BEP and PACMAD grasses. Using genetic data, the team also organized the species into their evolutionary tree, which they then used to infer the anatomical traits of ancestral grasses that no longer exist today, a common analytical technique known as ancestral state reconstruction. That allowed them to consider how anatomical differences likely evolved among species over time.

…Erika Edwards“Now that we have this increasingly detailed bird’s-eye view, we can start to become a more predictive science. ... In terms of genetic engineering we’re going to be able to provide some useful information to people who want to improve species, such as important crops.”

“Now that we have this increasingly detailed bird’s-eye view, we can start to become a more predictive science. ... In terms of genetic engineering we’re going to be able to provide some useful information to people who want to improve species, such as important crops.” Credit: Mike Cohea/Brown UniversityIn C4 plants, such an anatomical arrangement facilitates a more efficient transfer and processing of CO2 in the bundle sheath cells when CO2 is in relatively short supply. When temperatures get hot or plants become stressed, they stop taking in as much CO2, creating just such a shortage within the leaf…

A grassland in Canastra, Brazil, shot by BDG2007, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Invasive plant species may harm native grasslands by changing soil composition

Newswise: The future landscape of the American Midwest could look a lot like the past—covered in native grasslands rather than agricultural crops. This is not a return to the past, however, but a future that could depend on grasslands for biofuels, grazing systems, carbon sequestration, and other ecosystem services. A major threat to this ecosystem is an old one—weeds and their influence on the soil.

According to a study in the journal Invasive Plant Science and Management, when invasive plants spread, they can leave behind a “legacy” of alteration in the native soil. Even after an invading species has been controlled, its effects can inhibit the regrowth of native plant species. The causes of this process are still being investigated and may involve changes in soil food webs, soil microbial communities, and mutualistic fungi.

In the study, researchers tested soil conditions for changes in composition after three growth cycles of invasive plant species. Researchers looked for changes in colonization rates, diversity, and composition of arbuscular-mycorrhizal fungi (AMF).

Three exotic plant species—crested wheatgrass, smooth brome, and leafy spurge—were tested in a glasshouse experiment. These plants, all characterized as strong invaders, were grown in native soil collected from North Dakota grasslands. Native species, including western wheatgrass, little bluestem, and blue gramma, were also grown, and after three growth cycles, soil composition was compared among these treatments....

Grasslands in Inner Mongolia, shot by Shizhao, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Tracking invasive cheatgrass role in larger, more frequent Western fires

PhysOrg: New research that relied in part on satellite images suggests that cheatgrass, an invasive species brought west by settlers in the 1800s, is one cause for the larger, hotter and more frequent range fires experienced recently in the Great Basin of the American West. The arid region covers about 230,000 square miles (600,000 km) over much of Nevada and parts of Utah, Colorado, Idaho, California and Oregon.

Bethany Bradley, a biogeographer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, brought her expertise in remote sensing and spatial analysis to the study, which was led by fire expert Jennifer Balch of Penn State University.

Bradley used data from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectoradiometer from 2000 to 2009 to detect burned areas to create the first land cover map for the Great Basin area. With it, the two researchers and their colleagues combined data sets, matched fire dates and perimeters with land cover data to reach their conclusions, reported in the current online edition of Global Change Biology.

Bradley, Balch and colleagues say that over the past 10 years, cheatgrass fueled most of the largest fires, influencing 39 of the largest 50. Also, fires in grass-covered lands were on average significantly larger than the average fire size on lands dominated by other types of vegetation such as pinyon-juniper, montane shrubland and cultivated areas. Data also suggest that cheatgrass plays a role in more frequent fires.

"From 2000 to 2009, cheatgrass burned twice as much as any other vegetation," Balch says. "Although this result has been suspected by managers for decades," the authors note, "this study is the first to document recent cheatgrass-driven fire regimes at a regional scale."...

A 2007 fire outside San Diego, US Navy photograph

Diversity keeps grasslands resilient to drought climate change

Environmental Protection Online: For much of the year drought has been plaguing American grasslands. But a recent study found that grasses do not appear to be losing the turf war against climate when it comes to surviving with little precipitation. The Kansas State University-led study looked at the drought tolerance of 426 species of grass from around the world. The goal was to better understand how grasslands in different parts of the world may respond to the changes in frequency and severity of drought in the future.

Grasslands have several important ecological functions, according to Joseph Craine, research assistant professor of biology and the study's lead author. Grasslands convert and store carbon dioxide, are a food source for grazing animals like cattle and bison, and help cool the surrounding atmosphere. "The idea is that if you maintain a diverse grassland, you'll have a large number of drought-tolerant species ready to take over critical functions if there is a change in climate or an extended period of drought, like what we've had this year," Craine said. "Yet, we've never known which grasslands have drought-tolerant species in them."

Craine conducted the study with Kansas State University's Troy Ocheltree, research assistant of biology; Jesse Nippert, assistant professor of biology; Gene Towne, biology research associate and Konza Prairie Biological Station fire chief; and Adam Skibbe, information resource specialist for the Division of Biology, as well as with colleagues from the University of Oregon and the Nature Conservancy in Minneapolis, Minn. It is the largest study conducted to quantify how tolerant grass species are to severe drought.

...The benefits of a diverse grassland are evident when the U.S. faced a drought in the 1980s, said Towne, who also collects plant community data. "After that drought we saw a booming explosion of tall grasses the following year," Towne said. "So it really backs up what the study found: that drought forces the grasslands to adapt to the weather conditions so they can get through that rough period."...

Grasslands in Antelope Valley, California, shot by Scottthezombie, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

More grasslands, less tundra in Alaska's future

Yereth Rosen in Reuters: Long-term climate shifts will mean the spread of prairie-like grasslands and the displacement of much of the tundra habitat in Alaska and neighboring parts of Canada, according to a report released this week by the University of Alaska.

The report predicts climate shifts through the end of the century in Alaska and Canada's Yukon and Northwestern Territories.

The two-year Alaska, Yukon and Northwestern Territories Climate-Biome Shift Projects, conducted by the university in collaboration with government agencies and nonprofit groups from the United States and Canada, maps out expected changes for the 18 identified sub-climates in the study area, ranging from sparsely vegetated northern Arctic tundra to rainforest and grasslands.

Some changes are expected to be drastic, the report said. While climates have evolved in the past, the predicted transformations will be "a lot more rapid than historical changes in climate," said Nancy Fresco, a University of Alaska Fairbanks research professor and project manager for the Alaska and Canadian studies....

A road dip caused by melting tundra near Barrow, Alaska. Shot by Dr. John Cloud of NOAA

New study predicts declining range land in California

David Gabel in Environmental News Network: Duke University researchers have predicted that climate change in California will result in a declining percentage of rangeland. Such a change will have widespread impact on the state's large cattle industry of California's Central Valley. No matter if climate change will cause wetter or drier weather, available pasture will decline. Forage areas, known as one of nature's free services, may no longer be so free. The grasses will either wither as arid conditions creep north, or be pushed out as inedible shrubs and brush take over.

The study has been published in the journal, Climatic Change, by Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment in conjunction with the Environmental Defense Fund. The change in the rangeland ecosystem is expected to occur gradually over the coming century. Total costs expected to hit California ranchers over the next sixty years may be as high as $209 million a year if the ecosystem dries up.

Less grazing land will mean smaller herds, and less productive herds. Movement of cattle will also be much more difficult because of highways and suburban sprawl....

A black cow in Fremont, California, shot by Mark J Sebastian, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Warming climate could give exotic grasses edge over California natives

Robert Sanders in the UC Berkeley News Center: California’s native grasses, already under pressure from invasive exotic grasses, are likely to be pushed aside even more as the climate warms, according to a new analysis from the University of California, Berkeley.

In the study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Global Change Biology and is now available online, UC Berkeley biologists catalogued the ranges of all 258 native grasses and 177 exotic grasses in the state and estimated how climate change – in particular, increased temperature and decreased rainfall – would change them. They concluded that many of the traits that now make exotic grasses more successful than many natives also would allow them to adapt better to increased temperature and likely expand their ranges.

“When we looked at current patterns, we found that warmer temperatures favor certain traits, and these are the traits possessed by exotic species,” said coauthor Emily Dangremond, a graduate student in the UC Berkeley Department of Integrative Biology. “This led us to predict that, if the mean temperature increases in all zones in California, there is an increased likelihood of finding exotic species, and an increase in the proportion of species in a zone that are exotic.”

...“The ‘trait-based’ approach lets us test hypotheses about plant distributions in relation to climate without tying them to the identity of particular species,” Ackerly wrote in an email from South Africa, where he is on sabbatical. “As a consequence, the analyses can be generalized beyond California to other grassland areas.”...

From the UC Berkeley website: At Tom's Point in Marin Co., Calif., the exotic grass Holcus lanatus is common. (Credit Brody Sandel)

Encouraging grass growing in Ghana

Ghana News Agency: Professor David Millar, Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University for Development Studies (UDS), at the weekend stressed the need for Government and Institutions working in the area of climate change to add grass growing to their strategies.

He was speaking to the Ghana News Agency after making a presentation on the topic "Cultural Practices and Indigenous Knowledge in Desertification and Drought Control in Northern Ghana - Case Study of Traditional Authorities and Community Members" at a National desertification forum held in Bolgatanga.

The Professor explained that grass had the potential to harvest carbon better than trees, and said Government and institutions working in the area of climate change should not only focus on tree planting but also encourage grass growing.

He indicated that grass was one of the best methods used for erosion control and management, stressing that grass could be planted along areas threatened by erosion to prevent it from occurring or from worsening. He noted that grass when cultivated well could be transformed used for charcoal production through technology and this could reduce the practice where trees are cut for charcoal burning…

Elefant Ghana.jpgAn elephant in Mole National Park, Ghana, shot by Stig Nygaard, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Turning deserts into grasslands, combating climate change

A press release that popped in the Earth Times: Operation Hope, a project which is combating one of the major causes of climate change by transforming parched and degraded Zimbabwe grasslands and savannahs into lush pastures with ponds and flowing streams, even during periods of drought, has been named the winner of the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. Operation Hope was awarded $100,000 to further develop its work at a ceremony Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington DC.

Operation Hope is a project of the Africa Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe and its sister organization, the Savory Institute in Albuquerque, NM. Its successful approach to land management contradicts accepted practice and theories of resting land from animal grazing. Allan Savory, founder of Holistic Management as well as the Savory Institute and the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, has stood up to 40 years of scrutiny. Fellow scientists have called him mad for agreeing that livestock are indeed causing climate change, but arguing that they are also our only tool to save the planet from its current state.

Savory’s Holistic Management re-establishes the symbiotic balance between plant growth and the behavior of herding animals. Holistic Management uses livestock to turn deserts into thriving grasslands, restore biodiversity, bring streams and rivers back to life, increase food production and security and store carbon in ever deeper and healthier soils thereby combating global climate change. The approach is currently being practiced and producing results on over 30 million acres worldwide. And the scientists, NGOs and governments who once shunned him are coming to his centre in search of answers….

Chilojo Cliffs (Landscape), Gonarezhou National Park, Zimbabwe, shot by Ralf Ellerich, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Cambodia protects floodplain grasslands sheltering rare birds

Environment News Service: The Cambodian government has decided to protect six of the largest remaining stretches of lowland grasslands in Southeast Asia. The six sites, one in Siem Reap province and five in Kampong Thom province, encompass about 77,000 acres (31,160 hectares).

The sites are located in and around Cambodia's Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia's largest freshwater lake. They contain unique seasonally flooded grasslands that form a refuge for many globally threatened birds.

The grasslands are a fishing, grazing, and deep water rice farming resource for local communities. While most of the sites have been partially protected by a provincial conservation order, they remained vulnerable to land-clearing and dam-building activities associated with large-scale commercial rice production. The new designations empower staff from Cambodia's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries to prevent these activities.

The designation of the protected areas is the result of work done over the past four years by the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at New York's Bronx Zoo, in collaboration with Cambodia's Forestry and Fisheries Administration, local governments and community stakeholders….

Dwelling on the banks of Tonle Sap, shot by Jennifer Phoon, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license