Land Use and Land Cover Change of Chanthaburi Watershed Following 1999, 2006 and 2013 Floods

Abstract

The application of remote sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) have become an effective tool, which is labor, cost and time effective to assess and widely used in detecting, monitoring environmental change on the earth surface. Moreover, it can be used to study a pattern of land use and land cover (LULC) in the past, present and future. For this study, Landsat imageries were used as a data to deal with the assessment of land use and land cover changes (LULCC) before and after 3 flooded periods in 1999, 2006 and 2013. The images were used to create a false color composite and classified by supervised classification process, it can be identified as 9 LULC types, which consist of paddy field, field crop, para rubber, orchard, aquaculture, forest, mangrove, urban and built-up area, including water body. According to the result of this study, LULC types which mainly cover in the watershed are forest and orchard. After that, LULC were reclassified into 4 main classes for change detection, comprising of agricultural, forest, urban and built-up, and water bodies. The results showed LULC transformation mainly occur among agricultural land into the urban built-up area in the period 1999, 2006, and 2013. As a result, this study found that the socioeconomics factor plays an important role in LULC in Chanthaburi watershed. The results of this study can be used as data for making decision and planning LULC management, also in disaster response planning and flood risk management.