Unexploded Ordinances In Cambodia

Inspiration

This quarter I am taking a class on the Vietnam War that is paired with a study abroad trip to Vietnam in the early fall. On this trip I will be working with a non-profit Peace Trees to provide resources for unexploded ordnance(UXO) and landmine removal and environmental restoration to communities in the former demilitarized zone in Vietnam. I wanted to do something in relation to this for my project for this class. I decided that I would use Google Earth data, economic data, and agricultural data to predict which areas would be the most in need of resources and where resources would be most effective. However, it was difficult to find detailed data on unexploded ordinances in Vietnam, so I chose to research the neighboring country Cambodia instead as they are also affected by unexploded ordinances.

What it does

It generates data about Cambodia based on UXO and agricultural data. It also creates helpful sorted charts and maps of this data.

How we built it

Python, geopandas, matplotlib .shp data

Challenges we ran into

Dealing with multiple large DataFrames proved to be quite difficult because of alignment issues and missing data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successful sorting of large amount of data points by geography. Successful analysis of provincial data in relation to UXOs that gave clear and striking results.

What we learned

I learned a lot about how UXOs relate to poverty and how data analysis can be applied to better understand multi-variabled issues like these.

What's next for Unexploded Ordinances In Cambodia

I am not sure if the non-profit uses similar tools or if they just use traditional networking to reach these communities but I thought this would be an interesting project to apply my data science skills to. This tool could be beneficial for targeting resources to these regions and similar analytical methods could dive deeper into the effects of UXOs on Cambodians.

Built With

• geopandas
• matplotlib
• python