Integration of community-level social and environmental data: Spatial modeling of community boundaries in northeast Thailand

Researchers in the fields of geography and population studies have struggled with the integration of social and environmental data. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) offer spatial tools and data structures to facilitate this integration, but considerable data transformations are often necessary to enable this spatial linkage. These transformations have important implications for the nature of the resulting integration and for analyses performed using generated products. This dissertation explores methods of integrating social, spatial, and biophysical data and introduces new methods and concepts to the existing research. In addition, this research examines fundamental space partitioning considerations for linking people to the landscape through the definition of village boundaries set through land use considerations and not by arbitrary political units.;The human-environment linkage may be used to explore topics such as the relationship between deforestation and population migration or the relationship between landcover change and labor demand. One methodological hurdle contributing to the difficulty in linking population and environmental data is the question of how to define a meaningful boundary representation for communities.;This research discusses how to represent land ownership boundaries of rural communities in an agrarian environment where the predominant settlement pattern is characterized by nucleated household aggregations. Broad research objectives include: (1) how to spatially represent the household area of village communities, (2) how to spatially represent the area surrounding a community that is linked to that community through land use and land ownership patterns, and (3) how to use these representations to link community level data to spatially continuous biophysical data. The concept of spatial data transformations serve as the theoretical framework for this research and are used to address each of the above objectives within a GIS framework.;A series of vector-based point-to-polygon transformations are presented as one method of generating community boundaries. A region growing method is developed as an alternative method of generating boundaries. The region growing algorithm is a powerful tool allowing various social, spatial, and biophysical features which affect the spatial pattern of community-level land ownership to be integrated into the boundary-generation model.