Summary information
Study title
Longitudinal Ecosystem Service Data from Preah Vihear Province, Cambodia, 2019-2020
Creator
Willcock, S, Bangor University
Lewis, A, Bangor University
Bell, A, Boston University
Study number / PID
854681 (UKDA)
10.5255/UKDA-SN-854681 (DOI)
Data access
Open
Series
Not available
Abstract
We are interested in people’s use of nature to benefit themselves and their households (both directly and indirectly). We are conducting surveys through mobile phones to understand who uses nature’s benefits, how and why they use it, when they use it and where they use it most. We hope to have participants from two locations in Cambodia: Phnom Penh as our urban case study and Preah Vihear as a rural case study. The participants will become our citizen scientists and collect the data via an app, or by receiving phone calls, though the information they provide will be kept strictly confidential (as outlined below). We hope that the data generated will enable us to create a map of the most important places in these regions to the local people, and understand what problems people face in maximising their benefits from nature. The project will take 12 months to complete, with participants receiving small data and talk-time for weekly participation as well as building up credit to ultimately own the phone once the survey is complete (details below).
The project will include multiple short tasks each week. Each task will have a set number of points. These points build up and each week you will be given data and talk time corresponding to the number of tasks you have completed that week. It is important to remember that you will not be penalised for failing to complete a task. You can gain the credits later by participating as much as possible in all remaining tasks. Each task completed credit will also gain credit towards owning the phone at the end of the year, when the project is completed.
The tasks focus on food, culture, water, wild goods, wellbeing, demographics, income, poverty and natural hazardsDespite being vital for human well-being, ecosystem services (ES) – nature’s contributions to people – are increasingly threatened by human activities (e.g. overexploitation and degradation). The importance of ES is globally recognised. For example, 127 United Nation...
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Keywords
Methodology
Data collection period
01/01/2019 - 01/09/2020
Country
Cambodia
Time dimension
Not availableAnalysis unit
Individual
Household
Universe
Not availableSampling procedure
Not availableKind of data
Numeric
Text
Still image
Geospatial
Data collection mode
MobilES will distribute 480 smartphones to participants: 240 within urban wards of Phnom Penh, and 240 in the rural region of Preah Vihear. The rural sample will be stratified equally across areas that practice i) conventional and ii) wildlife-friendly farming, within the Wildlife-Friendly Ibis Rice Project. All participants will have the opportunity to respond to short qualitative and quantitative survey response tasks on a regular basis, from a daily to monthly timescale (with a maximum of 10 short tasks per week), over a one year period in a ‘microtasks for micropayments’ model (£0.05-0.1 per task, in form of data, sms, or credit toward device ownership), which has shown high retention rates for mobile-phone surveys within south Asia. The microtasks approach via smartphones offers numerous advantages vis-a-vis conventional data collection, such as the ability to capture high-frequency variation (such as shifts in access to ES, or changes in use patterns) without requiring participants to try to recall events of weeks or months in the past. Half the participants (i.e. 120 urban households and 120 rural households, the latter divided equally between conventional and wildlife-friendly farming) will respond to short survey response tasks coded in the Android Open Data Kit (ODK; https://opendatakit.org/) platform. Using ODK, short tasks that can be fit into a moment of downtime enabling a more representative sample than conventional surveys, which can only capture those respondents willing and able to take time away from work to participate - a critical advantage in comparative analysis across strata of income and economic opportunity. Our study design addresses the current challenge associated with this emergent mobile-based mode of data collection - difficulty in validating survey responses - by performing an equivalent telephone survey with the remaining half of our sample.These data contained numerous GPS locations. These have been removed where below the district level as we do not have permission to share these data.
Funding information
Grant number
ES/R009279/1
Access
Publisher
UK Data Service
Publication year
2022
Terms of data access
The Data Collection is available to any user without the requirement for registration for download/access.
Related publications
Not available