Temporal and Spatial Evolution Characteristics and Its Driving Mechanism of Land Use/Land Cover Change in Laos from 2000 to 2020

Abstract

Land use/land cover change (LUCC) research is of great significance to land conservation and regional sustainable development. At present, there is a lack of research on the long-term timing of the change process and mechanisms of LUCC that accords with the national level in Laos. Based on the Global Land-Cover product with the Fine Classification System at 30 m (GLC_FCS30) data set as well as economic and social statistical data, the authors analyzed the spatiotemporal regularity and driving mechanism of LUCC in Laos from 2000 to 2020 by using dynamic degree, flow direction analysis, principal component analysis, correlation analysis and other methods. The results show that: (1) Laos is rich in natural ecological resources. In 2020, the forest and shrubland areas accounted for 53.3% and 32.4% of the land area, respectively; (2) from 2000 to 2020, the rate of LUCC across the country continued to rise, and the integrated dynamic degree of LUCC was 14.4%. The change in impervious surfaces is the most drastic. The area of evergreen broad-leaved forest, evergreen needle-leaved forest and grassland continued to shrink, while the area of rainfed cropland, irrigated cropland, deciduous broad-leaved forest, shrubland, wetland and the water body continued to expand; (3) the LUCC process mainly occurred between forest, shrubland and cropland. The LUC with the largest transfer out area is evergreen broad-leaved forest (8.91 × 103 km2), and the LUC with the largest transfer into the area is shrubland (8 × 103 km2); (4) in the past 20 years, the LUCC process in Laos has been mainly affected by macro-socioeconomic development, agricultural development, and forestry development. The population is the key factor driving LUCC in Laos. This study can provide decision-making support for the rational planning and utilization of land resources in Laos.

Myanmar’s Land Cover Change and Its Driving Factors during 2000–2020

“…The changing trend of LUCC in Myanmar is similar to that of other Indochina countries. Research by Hu et al [18], Zhang et al [42], and Niu et al [43] in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and other countries also found the phenomenon of shrinking forests, shrubland, and the expansion of impervious surfaces.…”

Analysis of spatial and temporal evolution and drivers of cropland in the economic zone of the northern slope of Tianshan mountain

“…The center of gravity model is commonly employed to analyze the spatial relocation of geographical elements during regional development, capturing the changes in spatial elements through the direction, distance, and speed of the center of gravity's migration. In this study, this model was employed to examine the spatial aggregation characteristics and the changing pattern of cropland distribution (Zhang et al 2022b). The equation for the model is shown as equation (5).…”

Characteristics and driving forces of spatiotemporal use change in urban agglomerations from the perspective of functional zoning - Taking the Central Plains urban agglomeration as an example

“…Although some scholars have considered analyzing land use changes in urban agglomerations from different levels of administrative divisions (He et al 2022), they failed to break through the geospatial limitations; some scholars have also divided functional are-as from socio-economic and natural resource dimensions (Miao et al 2021), but less consideration has been given to the land use characteristics of the urban agglomerations themselves. Scholars mainly depict the features of land use temporal changes by constructing LULC dynamic attitude models and comprehensive land use index models (Han et al 2021;; the CLUE-S model, landscape pattern index method and geo-information Tupu are employed to track changes in land use temporal and spatial patterns (Bosch et al 2020;Dutta and Das 2019;). Among them, geo-information Tupu (Tang and Li 2020), as a geospatial and temporal analysis methodology, has shown obvious ad-vantages in analysing land use.…”