Land Use Changes: Causes and Effects

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.

Kim Chi Vu is a lecturer/researcher in the Faculty of Geography,University of Science, Vietnam National University (VNU), Hanoi.She obtained PhD in geography at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven(KUL) in 2007, gained MSc in Geography at KUL in 1999 andreceived BSc in geograohy at VNU in 1996.