**1. Introduction**

Since the 1990s, global, regional and local studies of land use and land cover changes (LULCC) have greatly developed, thanks to advances in earth observation and monitor methods including remote sensing and GIS techniques. The matter of land use changes has been measured in many international and interdisciplinary researches such as remote sensing, environment and biogeography [1, 2].

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

In Southeast Asia, including Thailand, deforestation has been occurring during the last 15 years because of an increase in agricultural crops [3]. Land use land cover change in Prachuap Khiri Khan province was reported by the Office of Agriculture Economics (OAE) in 2014 that deforestation has been occurring 6.96% while agriculture and other land use increase 34.97 and 45.44% respectively [4].

Recently, remote sensing is widely applied for monitoring changes and dynamics in land use and land cover (LULC) observation and its impact to the environment. It offers a variety of benefits in LULC study and an opportunity to assess remote area such as tropical forest, high mountains, update land and terrain information and explore historical LULC. To offer more efficiency in identifying land cover changes, remote sensing is often combined with Geographic Information System (GIS) technique. GIS technology refers to for analyzing and managing spatial and temporal data associated with their features [5]. Both technologies provide capability to collect land use characteristics and changes by integrating existing remotely sensed data and relevant environments such as tropical forests, urban areas and coastal zone and different land transformations such as deforestation, urban development and desertification [2, 6–8]. This study shows environmental problems such as deforestation and soil erosion in Thailand caused by human activities. The results of this study could support local governments, local residents and farmers to focus on environmental problems in their regions. The erosion risk map can be used as the potential disaster information to establish field experiments plots for warning the risk area of soil erosion.
