Most protected areas are ecosystem remnants of a limited size. Few, if any represent intact ecosystems; therefore it has become increasingly important to locate each protected area as a functional component of a larger landscape (Mladenoff et al. 1993). Remotely sensed data are particularly effective for such geographic studies and are the most frequently used technique for the mapping of tropical forest change. Data from several time points allow the creation of land-cover maps over greater spatial extents and more frequent time steps than is possible with expensive field studies(Nagendra 2001).