Simulating future land use and ecosystem services in Northern Thailand

Enhancing ecosystem services is important as it provides foundation for the wellbeing of people. This paper presents the future land use simulation for enhancing ecosystem services using CLUMondo dynamic spatial model. The land use change was assessed from 1989 to 2013 in Wang Thong watershed of Northern Thailand using GIS and a set of ecosystem services was assessed using the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model. Future land uses until 2030 were projected for three policy scenarios, namely business-as-usual, integrated land use development, and enhancing environmental services with different levels of emphasis on ecosystem services. In business-as-usual scenario, it was observed that ecosystem services will decline by 2030 from the base year of 2013, whereas in integrated land use development scenario, the ecosystem services will increase by 5% compared to base year due to anticipated effective protection of remaining forests in all existing and proposed protected areas of the study area. In enhancing environmental services scenario, the ecosystem services will increase by 15%. Such results can serve as useful information in policy formulation in developing land use options, which help enhance ecosystem services in future.     

Natural dyeing of wool and hair with indigo carmine (C.I. Natural Blue 2), a renewable resource based blue dye

Indigo carmine can be used as a source of blue dye for wool and hair dyeing. The option to use indigo carmine in combination with other natural dyes in a one-bath procedure as a hybrid dyeing concept is of interest both for natural dyeing and for coloration of hair. The present study shows that indigo carmine dyeing on wool exhibits the substantial sorption in the range of pH 4–5 and temperature between 40 and 60 °C. Experiments with human hair samples indicate that the experiments on wool can serve as a model that can be applied for hair dyeing. Comparisons of the energy, water and chemical consumption between two-bath dyeing with indigo and natural dyes separately and a one-bath dyeing using indigo carmine together with other natural dyes demonstrates the advantages of the one-bath hybrid dyeing concept.