Using Landsat Satellite Imagery To Assess The Land Use And Land Cover Change Of Phoukhaokhouay National Protected Area, Lao PDR

The main objectives of this study were to assess the dynamic of land use and land cover change of PhouKhaoKhouay National Protected Area (PKK-NPA), Thoulakhom district, Vientiane province, Lao PDR between 1999 to 2014, the research contents mainly focus on the changing rate and the main cause of land use and land cover conversion during the studied period, also, to examine the local villager perception on land use and land cover change, the Vanghua village of Thoulakhom district was selected as a case study by using questionnaire survey. The dynamic change of land use and land cover was carried out by Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques for land cover change detection. Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) of 1999, Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) of 2006 and Landsat 8 Operational Land Image (OLI) of 2014 were used to analyze land use and land cover. Supervised classification was used to classify and prepare land use and land cover maps, and the Landsat image was classified by nine main categories. The ground investigation data were collected and used to calibrate the results based on the GIS and RS and all of the result accuracy was calculated.The results indicated that there was a decrease in forest cover from 1999 to 2014. The study also found that there was decrease in forest cover from 1999 to 2006, in which the evergreen forest, mixed deciduous forest and shrub is 1.11% decreased, whereas there are other increased in plantation and water bodies area occupies 0.28% and 1.83% respectively during the studied period. From 2006 to 2014, forest cover has increase by 0.55% (evergreen forest and mixed deciduous forest), in opposite, the agriculture area has decreased, the decreased area mainly used for natural restoration for shrubs and future natural secondary forests. Base on the data of ground survey, the overall accuracy of the GIS and RS assessment was calculated and the value was 82%.The total sample of household was 221, which our questionnaire survey were conducted based on the local villager perception about the important of forest resource, the regulation organize of forest resource and the socio-economic status of local villager. The questionnaire forms were analyzed with Microsoft Office Excel, counting, percentages, minimum, maximum, average value and standard deviation. The research result showed the villager’s perception on the important of forest resource with nine activities with an average value of 31.36 on strong level and the highest average value activity was that the forest is important for natural education, with the average value of 3.66. The villager’s perception on the regulations organize of the forest resource was at moderate level with the average value of 37.97, which the people’s opinion on the participation of village’s forest laws was at strong level with the average value of 3.50. The people’s perception on the socio-economic status has the average value of 20.93 with moderate level, shown the socio-economic status has benefit for the community and their families were in a strong level which average value of 3.40 and 3.41 respectively.