| The growing literature on human-environment interactions in developing countries has important ecological and policy implications. Placing such research in a spatially and temporally explicit setting allows for greater insight into the processes characteristic of human-environment interactions as manifested on a dynamic landscape. The characterization of that landscape and its evolution are analyzed within a landuse/landcover change (LULCC) framework through a longitudinal approach to post-classification change detection. Set in Northeast Thailand, this research examines twenty-five years of landscape change from 1972 to 1997 through the use of remote sensing and social survey products integrated in a Geographic Information System (GIS). Landscape trajectories are characterized through a panel approach and related to variables created in a GIS that represent social, biophysical, and geographic thematic domains, including soil moisture potential, population potential, climatic and vegetative variation, and geographic accessibility to transportation and hydrographic infrastructure.; This research is grounded in theories drawn from geography, ecology, and public policy subfields: landscape ecology, political ecology, hierarchy theory, and resource management. These epistemological approaches are woven into a scale-dependent analysis that assesses not only the nature of landscape change but also the variability in the ability of remotely sensed data to capture replicable patterns of LULCC across spatial scales and thematic domains. A variety of analytic techniques and products are employed to exhibit the diversity of characterizations that are derived from any given landscape assessment technique. As such this research posits that no single landscape characterization technique is sufficient to explain complex ecological systems, and calls for a move toward a new Integrated Landscape Characterization (ILC). Moreover, this work adds to the existing human-environment, remote sensing, and GIScience literatures by placing the research within a multi-scale policy context established through interviews of Thai government officials. In beginning to unravel the scale complexities within resource management policy that mirror those found in human-environment interactions, the research integrates science and management to develop a new geographic and ecological approach referred to as policy ecology. |
