During the past few decades, the forest area in Thailand markedly decreased from 53 % to 26 % of the total land area during the period 1960-1995. The forest cover has been converted to other types of land use, such as, farmland, urban areas, orchards, etc. In this study attempts were made to analyze the process of deforestation in the Mae Klong Watershed Research Station (Lintin), Thongphaphum District, Kanchanaburi Province, Thailand. This case study is useful to observe the drastic changes in land use and land cover in rural areas in Thailand.
Five different time series of aerial photographs were interpreted and land use maps were made in 1954, 1969, 1974, 1986 and 1994 to evaluate the impact of anthropogenic forces on land use changes in rural Thailand. From aerial interpretation, we can classify land use into two main types; forest and agricultural land. Based on the land use maps of 1954 and 1994, the forest cover in mountainous areas had been less converted to other types of land use than that in flat areas. However, forests in mountainous areas were continuously degraded during the study period. On the other hand, forest land use in flat areas decreased gradually from 1954 to 1974, and rapidly in 1974 and 1994 while agricultural land use increased. The changes of the forest cover in the mountainous and flat areas indicate that the topographic factors are related to the changes of land use and land cover in the area. In flat areas, the increase of the number of households in the two villages was an important factor for the conversion of the forest area to agricultural land. Therefore anthropogenic factors directly affected land use and land cover changes in the study area.