Land Use Changes: Causes and Effects: a Case Study in the Suoi Muoi Catchment, Son La, Vietnam

This book presents a concrete research study on landuse and land cover changes over the last 50 years ina karst mountain area of Vietnam. The main issues areland use changes, their causes, and implications onthe local environment. The book consists of sixchapters. After the introduction in chapter 1,chapter 2 details historical land use and land coverchange patterns, which were reconstructed usingvarious spatial data sources: satellite images andaerial photos. Chapter 3 explains the variables thatare found in logistic regression models to becorrelated with observed land use changes of bothshort and longer time spans. It is clearly evident inthis study that the factor 'ethnicity' wassignificantly correlated with the observed land usechange patterns. Chapter 4 delineates in-depthresearch on cultural characteristics of differentethnic groups and their land use changes at villagelevel. Chapter 5 focuses on the impact of theobserved land use changes on the local naturalenvironment of the study area. Finally, chapter 6presents the conclusions and prospects of this research.