The Office of Agricultural Economics (OAE), Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, is the principal agency responsible for agricultural statistics. Activities of remote sensing for land use in Thailand were initiated in 1975, in the field of Area Sampling Frame (ASF) to estimate the area, yield, production, related information for "major rice" (rainy season rice) along with ground truth data for remote sensing research i.e. training samples for image processing. In 1984, OAE initiated the forecasting of the planted area and crop production and related information about economic crops, using satellite data both at optical and microwave levels.
Applications of GIS were initiated in 1990, with a view to mapping the area suitable for the planting of economic crops in Thailand on a scale of 1:250,000 using Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The area was derived from the overlay of data of 312 soil series and thirty nine years of average rainfall as well as irrigated boundaries for 4 suitability classes, namely, highly suitable, moderately suitable, marginally suitable and unsuitable, in the main 25 watershed areas of Thailand. This map will enable to delineate forest conservation areas from forest legal boundary map, built-up areas and others from land use map. All these will overlay administrative boundaries such as provincial boundaries, district and sub-district boundaries, along with main road networks. The results will provide suitability maps for the area planted with crops of economic importance in Thailand along with the determination of high suitability, moderate suitability, marginal suitability, and unsuitability classes, existing forest area, deforestation area, water and built-up areas. The area of each class should conform to the administrative boundaries of the 76 provinces in Thailand (total area of 51.20 million hectares).