About the Nang Rong Projects

Overview

The Nang Rong Projects encompass 12 studies that span a period of 20 years in the Nang Rong district in northeast Thailand.  The rapid growth and development of this relatively poor farming district provides the ideal context for understanding changes in social networks, migration, agricultural practices, land use and land cover, and population-environment interactions.  A team of researchers has collected information from more than 50,000 individuals as well as from administrative records, meteorological data, satellite images, and many other sources, to assemble an extraordinary data collection rich with information.

Goals

Nang Rong research contributes to a better understanding of the complex issues — social, demographic, economic, and environmental — of a society in transition.  The overarching goals of the Nang Rong Projects:

• Collect comprehensive data that follow individuals over the life course and follow households, communities, and landscape through transition.
• Use innovative methods to integrate data from multiple sources to yield the highest quality information resource.
• Make data available to the scientific community for analysis and interpretation.
• Disseminate information via a Web-based training program to enable high school students and their teachers in both the US and Thailand to better understand the dynamics of land use.

Data

The design and collection of data and their integration into a wide-ranging, flexible, and spatially explicit GIS database is one of the major accomplishments of the Nang Rong Projects.  The extensive Nang Rong data cover a range of spatial, social, and temporal scales of people, place, and environment.  Dozens of studies involving the Nang Rong data have been published and are listed on this Web site.  Topics include the impact of international commodity markets on land use in the district; the extension of road networks, settlement patterns and deforestation, and population change.  Five data sets are available for further study and analysis.  Current and future research efforts will expand geo-spatial data to project land use and land cover change into the future as far as 2020.