Monitoring and mapping rural urbanization and land use changes using Landsat data in the northeast subtropical region of Vietnam

Abstract

Rapid land use change has taken place in many neighboring provinces of the capital of Vietnam such as Thai Nguyen province over the past 2 decades due to urbanization and industrialization. Deriving accurate and updated land cover and land-use change information is essential for the environmental monitoring, evaluation and management. In this study, a robust classification algorithm, Random Forest (RF) was employed in R programming to map and monitor temporal and spatial characteristics of urban expansion and land-use change in Thai Nguyen province, Vietnam. The results showed that there has been a substantial and uneven urban growth and a significant loss of forest and cropland between 2000 and 2016. Most of the conversion of agriculture and forest into built-up and mining uses were largely detected in rural regions and suburbs of Thai Nguyen. Further GIS analysis revealed that rapid urban and industrial expansion was spatially occurred in the southern rural portions and central area of the province. This study also demonstrates the potential of Landsat data and combination of R programming language and GIS to provide a timely, accurate and economical means to map and analyze temporal land cover and land use changes for future national and local land development planning. Keywords: Rural land cover, Remote sensing, GIS, R programming