Integrated Modeling of Agricultural Systems in Mountainous Areas

People’s decisions with respect to agricultural land use and management practices have had a major impact on natural resource degradation in Vietnam and Thailand for centuries. In addition to an ever-increasing population density, economic transformation and market integration have exacerbated the pressure on natural resources in the rural areas of both countries, particularly during recent decades. From its beginning, the Uplands Program has sought to address research questions related to the impacts of land use management on natural resource degradation at the landscape level in Southeast Asian countries, as have researchers linked to the Program in the area. Integrated modeling of land cover and land use change, as a means to simulate effects which extend over various spatial and temporal scales or scientific domains, began to play a more prominent role within the Uplands Program after 2006. This chapter highlights modeling approaches and decision support tools used as part of the Uplands Program to investigate various research questions at the human–biophysical interface, and will compare modeling approaches, looking at the issues of land use and management impacts from different angles, whereby the different focuses used by each model have resulted in different levels of detail and precision in various respects.