ABSTRACT
The Tonle Sap Lake (TSL), located in Cambodia, is the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia and has significant ecological, economic, and sociocultural value. The TSL's ecosystems have been affected by climate change and an increasing amount of human activity in recent years. Considering that the TSL area is often covered by clouds, particularly in the rainy season, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data are suitable for assessing the ecosystems in this great lake, as SAR enables weather- and cloud-independent observations. In this study, we investigated the capability of the RADARSAT-2 Wide Fine (WF) mode dual-polarization SAR data with a scene size of 170 × 150 km (azimuth × range) and a resolution of 7.6 × 5.2 m to study TSL's ecosystem, by analysing the usefulness of backscattering coefficients and scattering mechanism-related parameters in identifying artificial targets and different land-cover types. The results of this study demonstrate the applicability of RADARSAT-2 WF-mode SAR data in the study of TSL's ecosystems.
