Integration of Geo - informatics Technology and Community Participation Affecting on Increasing Forest Area: A Case Study of Yang Watershed, Nan Province

Abstract

Forest areas have tentatively decreased and transformed to other uses. There is less research which focuses on integrating technology and participation to increase forest areas and land use efficiency in small watershed. This paper proposes to integrate geo - informatics system with community participatory process to raise up the land use efficiency of a community in Yang watershed, Nan Province. The procedure was conducted during 4 years (2016 - 2019) using geo - informatics technology to analyze spatial data of land use in 2016, and generate people awareness including selective land use design collaboratively with the 17 pilot households and 2 alternative careers i.e. (1) land development with the principle of agroforestry by mixed - economic trees, and (2) farming development of vicinity areas with the production of organic vegetable and fishery. A set of data was spatially analyzed to monitor land use in the watershed. It was found that in 2019 forest areas had obviously increased by 2,047.1 rais, (from 14,922.7 rais to 16,969.9 rais). The decreased proportion of land use consists of maize areas (A202) and rice paddy (A101) decreased by 43.7 and 6.3 %. The increased proportion of land use consists of forest areas (F), mixed perennial or orchard areas (A301 / A401), abandoned field crop areas (A200), water body areas (W), urban and built - up area (U) increased by 31.3 , 11.9 , 5.1 , 1.6 and 0.1 %, respectively. This research can be a prototype in the generation of selective occupation to increase land use efficiency and applied to other small watersheds later on.