Land cover change detection and land evaluation of burg el Arab region, North West coast, Egypt

Abstract EN

-The identification of land use/land cover (LULC) classes and their changes over time as well as land evaluation help the decision makers in agricultural development planning.

Burg El Arab area represents one of potential locations for future development in the north-western coast of Egypt.

Supervised classification of remote sensing imagery and the calculation of Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) as effective tools were applied to monitor the LULC changes in this area.

Data showed that the area was subjected to significant changes in the last three decades due to the increase of reclamation projects as well as industrial activities.

From 1984 to 2014 the agriculture land, urban land and water bodies increased by about 10%, 17.6%, and 3.6 %, respectively.

This increase took place on the expense of barren land.

Land evaluation serves as an essential tool for land use planning.

The application of MicroLEIS system to determine land capability and suitability classes in a representative area at Burg El Arab region indicate that most of the area (about 60%) lies in class 3 (fair capability) with minor areas (21% and 19%) in class 2 (good capability) and class N1 (currently not capable), respectively.

Data of land suitability classes exhibited that major area (61%) is not suitable for wheat, maize, melon, sunflower, cotton, and sugar beet.

The marginally suitable area include (S3) represents 23.6% except for maize where it represents only about 3.5%, while the rest of the area is conditionally suitable (S4) for all the tested crops.

The limiting factors which affect the land capability and suitability include erosion risk, bioclimatic deficit, slope and soil properties which comprise salinity, sodium saturation, texture and calcium carbonate content