In the lower Mekong Basin, students investigate how freshwater ecosystems, forests, and communities are connected, and how they're changing.
The Tonle Sap is a lake that breathes. Each monsoon it reverses flow, swelling to five times its dry-season size and flooding forests that sustain one of the most productive inland fisheries on Earth. The SFS Center for Environmental Justice and Mekong Ecologies sits on the outskirts of Siem Reap, minutes from the Angkor ruins, in a river basin that holds over 1,200 fish species, Irrawaddy dolphins, and giant freshwater stingrays, 19% of them threatened.
Semester excursions reach the Elephant Valley Project in Mondulkiri, where Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary protects over 60 globally threatened species, and floating villages on the Tonle Sap where students overnight in homes that rise and fall with the water. They observe elephant foraging behavior in evergreen forest, survey bat populations at Siem Reap's Botanical Gardens, and conduct fish morphology exercises alongside Cambodian university students in communities where livelihoods depend on every catch.
Counted catch and interviewed the fishers and traders of Kampong Khleang, extending a multi-year record that can separate a natural dip in the endemic Tonle Sap watersnake from a true decline.
Worked with Indigenous researchers from across Cambodia on land use research designed so the communities whose land is at stake set the questions rather than answer someone else's.
The Participatory Guarantee System lets farmers certify each other rather than pay an outside inspector. A serious game, a first for the center, drew out how households decide to join.
Compared otters kept in pairs against those in family groups, testing whether social grouping changes activity and welfare. The answer shapes how rescue centers house their animals.
The center sits on the outskirts of Siem Reap, with five rooms of two to four students, air conditioning, en-suite bathrooms, and a pool on campus. Students travel extensively: from Prek Toal and Kampong Khleang on the Tonle Sap to the Bunong communities of Mondulkiri, a world apart from the temples of Angkor.
Students spend a night in a floating village at Prek Toal on the Tonle Sap, speaking with families about livelihood change. They travel to the Elephant Valley Project in Mondulkiri to work alongside Bunong mahouts, tour Angkor Wat with a professional guide, attend the Phare Cambodian Circus, interview elders in Kratie and Stung Treng, and visit Tuol Sleng for genocide remembrance. A Khmer language course roots all fieldwork in local context.
Enrolling now for Spring 2027, Summer 2027, and Fall 2027.
