Land Use Changes: Causes and Effects

This book presents a concrete research study on land use and land cover changes over the last 50 years in a karst mountain area of Vietnam. The main issues are land use changes, their causes, and implications on the local environment. The book consists of six chapters. After the introduction in chapter 1, chapter 2 details historical land use and land cover change patterns, which were reconstructed using various spatial data sources: satellite images and aerial photos. Chapter 3 explains the variables that are found in logistic regression models to be correlated with observed land use changes of both short and longer time spans. It is clearly evident in this study that the factor ethnicity was significantly correlated with the observed land use change patterns. Chapter 4 delineates in-depth research on cultural characteristics of different ethnic groups and their land use changes at village level. Chapter 5 focuses on the impact of the observed land use changes on the local natural environment of the study area. Finally, chapter 6 presents the conclusions and prospects of this research.