Introduction

For many years, humans have altered and changed the land for needs such as agriculture and cultivation, mining, and infrastructure.  In terms of agriculture in particular, many methods have been implemented to increase efficiency, one of which is popularly known as “slash-and-burn.”  This technique is implemented in many forests throughout the world, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions, including the mountains of Northern Thailand in the Chiang Mai province where trees are cut down and the land is burned to clear space for agriculture.  This technique severely degrades the land since soil erosion is significantly heightened because the amount of runoff when it rains is significantly increased.  Although some studies claim that many local farmers have used this method for hundreds of years and know the dynamics of the technique, this can still be a detrimental problem for this area if the technique is malpracticed by the younger generation, or practiced in excess.

A number of studies have undertaken the task to revealing the negative effects of slash-and-burn agriculture on the forests of the Chiang Mai Province.  However, the problem reaches further than just eroding land; slash-and-burn puts carbon emissions into the atmosphere when wood is burned, not to mention effects that spill over into the social sphere.  Traditional ways of life, such as preferred crops, can be lost should slash-and-burn be pushed to a threshold past where any restoration of soil health is insignificant or ineffective.

With this study, it is our hopes that we can clearly present the harms of slash-and-burn agriculture and the ways it is not only causing detrimental health effects for the people and the soil, but also building up an accumulation of unhealthy soil history that can someday reach a point where the soil becomes no longer cultivable.  We wish to use satellite remote sensing to visually identify the extent of the fires, the frequency with which they are set, a time series of this practice from past to present, and make projections for the future.

In this study, we will focus on thermal satellite sensors to find areas where temperatures are notably higher than surrounding areas to identify the fires.  Then, we will compare GIS imagery from a time series to further analyze the effected through time "slash-and-burn" agriculture has on the landscape over a period of five years between 2001 and 2006.