Role of Geospatial Technologies in Training for Sustainable Natural Resources Man-agement in Asia

In a context of rapidly changing socioeconomic conditions in Asia, which translate into land use and land cover changes, another ability that we rate highly is the ability of NRM stu-dents of dealing with the challenges of a dynamic environment.

2. Land use and land cover change as an NRM issue
Natural resource management issues today are in a rapid state of flux. Land use and other forms of natural resource use are changing under the influence of demographic growth, technological innovation, policy interventions, environmental degradation, globalization, change of values and lifestyles etc. Resource use changes have been happening before, but there is evidence that the rate of change has accelerated and that consequences of change, which affect both livelihoods and ecosystem processes are more far-reaching today than in the past, especially in Asia. Land cover change is an indicator for the scale and rate of land use changes.

Land use change in Asia, especially in the tropical and subtropical parts of South Asia and Southeast Asia, has involved the following modes of transition:

  • subsistence  ->  commercial/market-oriented
  • extensive  ->      intensive
  • multicrop  ->     monocrop
  • low input  ->      high input
  • low impact  ->     high impact
  • local control  ->    external control
  • extraction  ->       conservation
A well-studied example for this kind of change is the transition from shifting cultivation, the most widespread form of traditional land use in tropical and subtropical Asia, to other forms of land use such as permanent farming with cash crops (e.g. cabbage, soy beans), plantation crops (coffee, oil palm), tree plantations (e.g. teak, pine), or conservation (Schmidt-Vogt, 2000).

In some cases, we can observe a reversal of the trends sketched out above, e.g. a return to multicrop cultivation that started in the 1990s within the context of the promotion and spread of integrated farming that followed upon a crisis of industrialized farming in Thai-land (Tipraqsa 2005).

Other examples are the following transitions:

  • fishing -> aquaculture
  • rainfed farming -> irrigated farming
  • local forest use -> commercial logging
  • subsistence cropping -> cash cropping
The main causes for transitions such as these are: structural changes of the colonial and postcolonial periods, integration into the world economy, lifestyle changes, proliferation of a consumer culture, government interventions in the form of incentives or constraints, demographic growth.

The following questions concerning these changes are important from an NRM perspective:

  • what are the causes and drivers of these changes and transitions?
  • what is the nature and extent of these changes?
  • what are the effects of resource use changes on local livelihoods and environments?
  • if the effects are negative, what are the alternatives and solutions?
3. Geospatial technologies and their role in NRM
Assessment of the availability and condition of the natural resources is the first step while trying to answer the above questions concerning the changes. The assessment process fol-lows a continuum that involves determining the baseline rates or levels of various phenom-ena, establishing the trends in these measurements or conditions, identifying the causes of rates and trends, and determining the type and impact of consequences of rates and trends. An additional element, mitigation, represents the required follow-on actions in terms of policies or directives (International Council for Science, 2002). Four key functions that form the process needed to assess the continuum are:

  • Mapping: collection of thematic and quantitative baseline data (contemporary or his-torical) in geographic format
  • Measuring: more rigorous mapping process by quantifying and documenting the at-tributes of phenomena
  • Modeling: process of describing a system under study through precise and typically mathematical relations of inputs and outputs, and to simulate the present, past or fu-ture behaviour
  • Monitoring: regular assessment of the conditions by also recording the shifts or changes in natural phenomena and human activities
These functions require scientifically valid, quantitatively up-to-date, spatially and tempo-rally explicit natural resource data and information to support informed decision-making, a topic high on the priority list of agenda 21. In many instances, a huge amount of data can be required depending upon the size of the area and the breadth and depth of the issue to be studied.

The advanced technologies, like Remote sensing, Global Positioning Systems (GIS), and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can serve as valuable tools for NRM-related opera-tions, viz. Assessment, Analysis, Development and Applications. Remote sensing systems offer a unique and highly flexible tool to survey and monitor biophysical resources and their characterization, and to track changes in the composition, extent, and distribution of com-munities and ecosystems (Wilkie and Finn, 1996). Remote sensing can provide data of vari-ous spatial resolutions that are required for the studies at all levels (macro, meso, micro). Figure 1 demonstrates an example of land cover change in the part of the Southeast region of Thailand, where almost 90 percent of lowland forests that existed in 1990 are converted to agricultural or other land uses by 2001.


Figure 1. Landsat TM data showing land cover change in the southeast region of Thailand.



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