Utilization of Satellite Imagery and Geo-Information System for Land Use Assessment in Prachinburi Province, Thailand 2016.

Prajinburee is one of the most important provinces of Thailand because there are a lot of industrial estates, famous on rice and fruits production, located near Bangkok and good transportation network. There are many roads that connect it to the other provinces in Central, East, and North-East region of Thailand. Land use analysis section, Land Development Department, Ministry of agriculture and cooperative has a responsibility to analyze, classify and make land use maps of all provinces in Thailand by using satellite imagery and ground survey checking. After that, those data are used for many purpose such as land suitability assessment for current land use of some economic crops. In addition, land use change is studied also. For this study, the results show that, in 2016, there were 52.63 percent of the province area were used for agriculture and 29.52 percent were forest. In addition, most of agricultural land were used for paddy field, perennial crops; for example, Eucalyptus plantations, Para rubber plantations, and commercial bamboo plantations, and field crops; for example, sugarcane and cassava. Furthermore, there were many commercial crops were grown on non-suitable land. Therefore, the government should advise them. The land use change analysis results show that, from 2006 to 2016, agricultural land, forest land, and miscellaneous land were continuous decreased, but the built-up land and Water body were increased. In addition, the land of some economic crop such as Para rubber tree and Oil palm tree were expanded.