Availability of QuickBird for land resource management in northern Laos

QuickBird lunched in 2001 provides the highest spatial resolution of commercial satellites, and it has been widely applied for urban planning, natural/man-made disaster monitoring etc. In addition to Panchromatic data with 60 cm/pixel resolution, Multi-spectral data with 4 bands including near-infrared is also equipped, thereby, QuicBird is useful for vegetation and agriculture analysis. In this study, to consider the availability of QuickBird for land resource management in slash-and-burn agriculture in northern Laos, the differences of data characteristics by land use were compared. The study site was Houayyen village in Luang Prabang Province. It located in the hilly mountainous area and predominant land use was upland rice cultivation implemented by short term rotation with cropping and fallow. QuickBird images acquired in July 2003, September 2004, and March 2005 were ortho-rectified using DEM derived from ASTER/VNIR. To complete the pixel matching among dataset securely, Image-to-Image registration and re-sampling was performed by Triangulation and Nearest Neighbor method, and GPS information were assigned into geo-referential points. Using Multi-spectral and Panchromatic imagery, data characteristics of the typical land use, i.e. upland rice field, fallows with different fallow length, river, etc. were investigated by the trend of Digital Number, NDVI and Texture indices. The results showed that the differences in fallow length were found in NDVI, and the separabillity by land use was found in some Texture indices, e.g. Mean, Variance, Homogeneity, Contrast and Dissimilarity. In addition, the superiority of resolution in QuickBird was useful to make field boundary map. It will be applied for the construction of field database including field survey data.