One of Cambodia’s largest protected areas, Botum Sakor National Park, continues to lose tree cover, recent satellite data show.
Officially designated as a national park in 1993, Botum Sakor initially covered more than 182,000 hectares (450,000 acres) of evergreen, semi-evergreen and mangrove forests. Older surveys from the 1990s and 2000s show that the park was historically home to numerous wildlife, including the critically endangered Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica), and the pileated gibbon (Hylobates pileatus).
Today, Botum Sakor National Park (BSNP) is a whisper of the expansive old-growth forest it once was. From 2002 to 2023, the national park lost 30% of humid primary forest within the park’s originally designated limits, according to the Global Forest Watch (GFW) monitoring platform.
