Soil quality assessment of el-fayoum depression, Egypt, using remote sensing and GIS

Abstract EN

El-Fayoum depression has a major source of irrigation Nile water in Bahr Youssef canal.

It also has a special nature among all the other depressions.

Between 1990 and 2020, there were changes in land use/cover.

The entire area of bare soil is reducing by approximately 20427 ha, whereas the total area of urban areas is expanding by approximately 16335 ha, the total area of vegetation is increasing by approximately 3347 ha, and the total area of water bodies is increasing by approximately 860 ha.

Soil quality assessment is a tool for bettering soil management and land use.

Soil quality indicators are a collection of physical, chemical, and biological aspects of soil that are used to measure its quality.

The spatial variability for soil quality map for the study area was created using geostatistical techniques for GIS.

The study's end purpose is to give a soil quality assessment based on parameters including EC, pH, OM, CEC, ESP, texture and CaCO₃.

Using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Indices (NDVI) collected from satellite remote sensing data, the researchers calculated estimations of soil fertility from vegetation quality.

High soil quality occupies a small portion of the studied area, around 1.9 percent, while moderately soil quality occupies the largest portion of the studied area, around 52.7 % of the total area studied, and low soil quality occupies around 45.4 percent of the studied area.