Analysis of changes in the agricultural and forest areas and the impact of socio-economic activities in the Ba River Basin, Vietnam

In the Ba river basin, the natural forest area has been decreasing and agriculture area has been increasing at an uneven rate for the last 30 years. Objective of this research is analysing the change in the agricultural and forest areas under the impact of socioeconomic activities in this basin. Landsat satellite images with a resolution of 30 m acquired from 1989 to 2019 were used to assess the changes. To enhance the classification speed of data, this research applied the online Google Earth Engine platform and GIS tools to process and edit results. The results showed that the largest decrease in forest area was from 1989-2000 (-159,000 ha) while the agricultural area increased the most in the period 2010-2017 with more than 176,000 ha. The main reasons of conversion forest land into agricultural land such as fruit trees and perennial industrial crops were the increasing of population and agricultural prices. Besides, the demand of electricity caused the deforestation for hydropower plantations.