Book excerpt: Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: Tropical land use changes, predominantly the clearing of tropical rain and monsoon forests, have long been recognized as a trend with dramatic consequences. FAO estimated the global loss of rain forest area at 0.6 to 0.9 % per annum in 1993. Most of it can be attributed to the conversion of forest lands to agricultural areas. In Southeast Asia, two countries have suffered from this phenomenon more than any other nations: the Philippines and Thailand. Between 1961 and 1975, the forest reserves of Thailand have been reduced from 57 % to 37 % of the total area, while at the same time the area put to agricultural use has almost doubled. Only a small part of that process was due to organized resettlement programmes; to an overwhelming extent the deforestation has been performed 'illegally' by spontaneous activities of the rural population. The share of forests further declined to 28.9 % in 1998, at a current rate of -0.7 % per year, meaning that Thailand's forest cover has roughly halved since 1960. The author of this thesis stayed as a visiting researcher at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), immediately north of Bangkok, for 6 months from November 2000 until April 2001. The AIT is a small international university for graduate studies with students and teachers from more than 40 countries. The core institution for this scientific cooperation was the Asian Center for Research on Remote Sensing (ACRoRS) of the AIT's School of Advanced Technologies (SAT). Field work in Northeast Thailand was carried out in two legs in February and April 2001. As an underlying principle of this study, it was attempted to incorporate problems from the realms of social as well as physical geography, i.e. to maintain a balance between questions of applied geography (regional studies) and remote sensing. This also means that no special focus was put on advanced RS methodology such as the development of new image processing techniques; the study is rather based on a somewhat holistic approach, joining aspects from many different fields of science as diverse as geology, geomorphology, climatology, agriculture and agricultural economics, sociology, ethnology, politics, and spatial planning. Accordingly, the basic objectives were: - to give a geographical description/characterization of the Northeastern Region of Thailand in terms of its physical properties as well as its social and economical peculiarities. - to try a quantification of forest [...]