Change Detection of Land Use/Land Cover Categories in the Nile Delta Region Using Remote Sensing and GIS

Research Abstract

PAPER NUMBER: 9239-59 SPIE Remote Sensing "Remote Sensing for Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Hydrology" 22 - 25 September 2014, Amsterdam, Netherlands Change Detection of Land Use/Land Cover Categories in the Nile Delta Region Using Remote Sensing and GIS Sayed M. Arafata, Afify A. Afifyb, Nagwan M. Afifyb, Mohamed M Elshrkawya a) Agricultural Applications Dept., National Authority for Remote sensing and Space Sciences, Cairo, Egypt b) Soils and Environment Research Inst., Agriculture Research Center, Giza, Egypt E-mail: smarafat@narss.sci.eg ABSTRACT The Nile Delta region is a national issue for efficient land use/land cover at this diverse and valuable ecosystem. The Nile Delta Region is the core for a balanced economy in Egypt and a proper management is a key factor to integrate the use and maximize the benefit of its various natural resources, such as, agricultural areas, inland lakes and human resources. The continuous urbanizing activity is one of the most significant adverse changes that negatively impacted the Deltaic area in Egypt. Timely and accurate data are needed to allocate and monitor the change detection in Nile Delta regions in order to act a necessary action for regulating this catastrophic phenomenon. The objectives of this study were to utilize multi date of remotely sensed data and geographic information system (GIS) to monitor spatial and temporal changes in agricultural land use. Also, to quantify agricultural land loss this is situated in the Nile Delta. Monitoring of changes in Nile Delta was based on studying the land use and land cover in the years 1984, 2007 and 2010. The study was performed by integrating the fieldwork observations as well as satellite data of Landsat 1984, SPOT4 2007 and Egyptsat-1 2010 to assess the detection change. The results showed the trend of changes in the arable land as cultivated areas versus non-cultivated ones. The cultivated areas were detected as 2.51M hectare and 2.48M hectare in the years 2007 and 2010 respectively which decreased by 29.4 thousand hectare. The non-cultivated areas were detected as 583880 and 6176576 hectares in the years 2007 and 2010 respectively. It was found that the main factor that affected the decrease of cultivated areas is the rapid extension of the informal settlement which was viewed as 279428 and 313489 hectares in the years 2007 and 2010 respectively. This settlement extension denatured 34060 hectares of the cultivated area loosing 11353 hectares per year. The study cleared that the urban encroachment is dominated by an informal pattern and denatured a unique alluvium, which is irrigated by a potential power of water flow "Land-River Nile Mode". This rapid extension of settlement is most probably related to population increase, as well as roads development (3%) that encouraged the urban building- up aligning these new paved roads. The study concluded that this human activities over the arable land that mostly act as an informal management is deteriorating the environmental elements in Nile Delta. The rate of this degradation will be exaggerated in a head future, if the case will be later on scanned in the same study area by more recent remote sensing data. Key words: Nile Delta, Egypt, land use changes, Multi-Spectral Imageries.

Research Keywords

Nile Delta, Egypt, land use changes, Multi-Spectral Imageries.