Detection and assessment of the spatio-temporal land use/cover change in the Thai Binh province of Vietnam’s Red River delta using remote sensing and GIS

The land is one of the prime natural resources of a country, and its transformation is a natural process that cannot be stopped but can be regulated. The issues of land use change and land cover change (LULC) have been a concern in various fields of research on management, monitoring, land planning, landslides, erosion, and global climate change for sustainable development purposes. This study aims to monitor the spatial–temporal land use pattern changes in the lowland Thai Binh province of Vietnam’s Red River Delta and its driving force factors by applying remote sensing (RS) images and GIS techniques during 2000–2020. The supervised classification technique was implemented to classify these images into six significant classes (waterbodies, forests, agriculture, aquaculture, settlements, and bare soil/rock). The Kappa coefficient to evaluate the classification accuracy obtained values greater than 0.8 for all three studied years (2000, 2010, and 2020). The results show that the agriculture class area decreased sharply from 1255.01 km 2 in 2000 to 740.49 km 2 in 2020. On the other hand, the settlement area increased sharply and continuously during the studied 20-year period from 207.00 km 2 in 2000 to 727.07 km 2 in 2020. Meanwhile, the waterbodies, forests, aquaculture, and bare soil/rock classes have minor changes. The findings demonstrate that the land use changes in the study area during the past 20 years are due to socioeconomic development, especially urbanization, which provides essential insights for land use management in future planning.