Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

5-2020

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Department

Geography and Geosciences

Degree Program

Geography (Applied), MS

Committee Chair

Gaughan, Andrea

Committee Member

Stevens, Forrest

Committee Member

Nghiem, Son

Author's Keywords

human-environment; land systems science; remote sensing; agriculture; mixed methods

Abstract

Agricultural transition represents an essential component of land-use and land-cover change in developing countries across the world, as economic and social factors pressure agriculturalists out of traditional subsistence farming into food commodity production. Modernization has altered modes of income, land ownership, and livelihood in Southeast Asia drastically in recent years. The Bình Thuận Province of southern Vietnam experienced a particularly radical transformation with the introduction of dragon fruit cultivation, which has been profoundly encouraged by outside markets in China, Australia, and Japan. This research combines remote sensing and qualitative research to examine and characterize a changing agricultural landscape in rural southern Vietnam associated with dragon fruit cultivation. This mixed-methods approach addresses the questions: can remote sensing methods detect the rate and nature of land-cover change in the context of the dragon fruit boom in Vietnam; and how has dragon fruit production affected the livelihood of those who live and work in the Bình Thuận province? Through visual representation of semi-structured interview trends, as well as change detection techniques sensitive to seasonal variation in remotely-sensed data, this paper characterizes agricultural transition for a rapidly changing region in the world. It also represents the unique insight offered by a land systems sciences case study to relate to global patterns of change.

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