Modern mapping of Cambodia was first carried out by French colonial authorities as part of their Indo-Chinese surveys, with triangulation completed by 1939 and 1:100,000 basic scale mapping published and revised prior to French disengagement in 1955. American aid after independence assisted the development of the national mapping agency, the Service Géographique Khmer (SGK) in Phnom Penh. Complete new photogrammetric 1:50,000 scale mapping was prepared, sheets covered 15′ quadrangles, and conformed to U.S. AMS mapping standards. French 1:100,000 scale coverage was revised and a 1:250,000 scale series was derived from the new 1:50,000 mapping to cover Cambodia in 19 sheets. These series all used the Transverse Mercator projection, Everest ellipsoid, and were published from the National Geographic Directorate, Dalat (now Tong Cuc Dia Chin (TCDC), Hanoi).
Soviet military topographic mapping of Cambodia exists at the following scales: 1:1,000,000 (2 sheets, complete coverage, published 1965-1985); 1:500,000 (7 sheets, complete coverage, published 1984-1992); 1:200,000 (39 sheets, complete coverage, published 1979-1983); 1:100,000 (128 sheets, complete coverage, published 1978-1991) and a city (1:10,000) topographic map of Phnom Penh published in 1978. These products are available in print, digital raster and digital vector GIS formats from East View Geospatial.
The best available earth science coverage of the country are the 1:1,500,000 scale geological and minerals sheets published in the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) Atlas of mineral resources. The responsible agency for earth sciences mapping is the Department of Geology and Mines in the Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy.
A vegetation map of the country was published by Institut Français de Pondichéry (IFP) in 1971 and depicted land cover prior to the significant deforestation of the war years. In 1996 new mapping depicting the huge changes in the wake of the war was published by French @ct’image in the Ecocarte series, and followed by a descriptive memoir a year later. The Mekong Secretariat (now Mekong River Commission Secretariat) in Bangkok issued a land use map in 1991.
With the return of stability, following withdrawal of Vietnamese forces in 1991 and democratic elections in 1993, a tourist industry has started to develop and tourist mapping of the country has been published by International Travel Maps (ITM), the French Institut Géographique National (IGN) and Periplus, the latter also printed with a town map of Phnom Penh.
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