Peter Lentes:
Testing GIS/RS Based Approaches for Estimating Village Boundaries -- the Case of a Region in North-Western Vietnam

PETER LENTES
University of Hohenheim, Department of Agricultural Economics and Social Sciences in the Tropics and Subtropics, Germany

Villages with predominant farming activities depend on the availability of land resources for production. In general, the area used by a community reflects the natural resource endowment that is available for agricultural production. The level of detail as offered by available maps, which are usually topographic maps at the scale of 1:50000 is often not sufficient, because administrative boundaries are only available on the scale of communal, provincial or national level. To build a spatial basis that allows the use of GIS in farming systems research, it is necessary to find a way to attribute the villages and with them the farms to the territory used for farming. Furthermore, the spatial basis is required to analyze the natural resource endowment, and to establish the link of the spatial setting with the socio- economic characteristics of villages.

In the case of 41 villages, that belong to 4 communes in Mai Son District, Son La Province, Vietnam, three methods of village territory estimation were applied and are compared in this paper. The first approach attributes land to the villages by applying a 1000 m buffer to the around each village. In the second approach, the buffer size was calculated according to the number of farms in the village. These two approaches do not consider, which type of land cover is inside the buffer, in contrary to the third approach, in which land territory polygon are built by incorporation of additional remote sensing and GIS derived information. The paper shows the differences between the approaches and outlines potentials and constraints in the use of GIS/RS in the establishment of the above mentioned linkages. Although the differences between the polygon method and the adjusted buffer method do not show significant differences, the polygon method is considered the best available choice in village territory allocation.

Keywords: GIS, Vietnam, village boundaries

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Contact Address: Peter Lentes, University of Hohenheim, Department of Agricultural Economics and Social Sciences in the Tropics and Subtropics, Fruwirthstraße 12, 70593 Stuttgart, Germany, e-mail: lentesuni-hohenheim.de