A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science, School of Advanced Technologies

Thesis (M. Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2003

The mapping and modeling of suitable afforestation sites is important to planning as well as launching a reforestation program. An attempt is also made to find suitability of tree species for the afforestation sites in the study area using GIS. In addition, as a basis to improve conventional techniques of afforestation, sets of advanced measures such as remote sensing and GIS have been employed to explore suitability of land condition analysis. Muak Lek District located in eastern part of Saraburi province, with typical diversity not only in environmental and physical but also in social features, was selected as the study area. Present land use/land cover (LU/LC) mapped by remote sensing was considered as a major factor for determining conflict of land use. Degraded forestland with less conflict amongst land cover types has been taken into account in case of optimal impact management. Image classification technique undertook such a task of finding appropriate location for afforestation. The quality estimation of selected land has been performed by using Geographical Information System. Seven major aspects concerning topography, soil, temperature, rainfall, transportation, drainage and workforce availability in combination with desirable tree species were considered for land suitability analysis. The results indicated that remote sensing technique was able to make present LU/LC available while GIS was useful in quantitatively analyzing present LU/LC condition. Integration of remote sensing and GIS made the analytical work more realistic and helped in applying various guidelines. Future planning and project launching can be followed using suitability maps generated from the study.