So, what does this all mean? Now that you're specialists and you can read all those colors, you can read this image, where we're going, to be able to tell us what the different kinds of land cover are in the area where we're going. We've actually helped you a little bit by showing you that A(upper right), in here, is the degraded forest and it's probably not somewhere where we necessarily want to spend a lot of time surveying, although it would be important to know what's in here because it is still small, fragmented forests.

This appears to us--although, again, we haven't been there--to be fairly nice broadleaf enclosed canopy forest (middle). The bluer colors over here(lower left) are clearly rice paddies. And this is a village commune. These are sites with bare soil and this appears to be a seriously degraded forest and a bamboo growth area.

We can also tell that the forest on the mountain slopes to the north is very different from the forest to the south. Hopefully you can see that there are color and texture variations between these two areas. This whole mountain range is what the Vietnamese government is wondering whether it should be part of a reserve. Some people have done surveys here in the south and found some dry, what's called dipterocarp forest, and very interesting plants and animals. But we don't know if this area, in the north, is similar or different and if it should be included in the reserves as part of the reserve system or if these forests can be hooked up with contiguous reserves off to the west. We'll be going to the northern region to determine how different it is and why it might be different.

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