The region of Southeast Asia is primarily situated in the tropics, which is supposedly home for a variety of vegetation, animals, and insects, building into biologically diverse environmental ecosystems. However, with the rise in urbanization and population density in the past several decades, urbanity has taken over the natural world and threatened much of the biodiversity in this tropical region.

Methodology

This research expands on the previous IPPD study and uses a total of 4 open-sourced data to look for the relationships between urbanity and natural spaces namely: 1) road networks from Open Street Map, 2) high-resolution population density from Humdata 3) tree coverage data from the Global Forest Watch created by WRI , and 4) water areas from Open Street Map. While figure 2 only shows the relationship between tree coverage and street density as a proxy for urbanity, other details, such as water features and population density will be added to this research to better understand the missing nuances that the previous research did not get to cover.

This research aims to explore spatial data in the whole Southeast Asian region beyond Thailand to better understand the relationships between ecological “green” areas and urbanity. While the main assumptions can be made that the more urban certain spaces become, the less “green” such places will be. This research also wants to find outliers that show how green urbanity exists in our developing world and highlight such places for future exploration