Assessment Of Land Use Changes And Its Impact On Agricultural Soils In The North Nile Delta Region Of Egypt Using Gis And Remote Sensing

EGYPT Nile Delta has very limited area of fertile soils which threatening by urban sprawl. Assessment of the urban area stretch effect on agricultural lands of the Egyptian Northern Nile Delta has been detected by using Landsat TM, Landsat ETM+ and Landsat OLI satellite images (1984, 2002, and 2016 respectively). Monitoring of urban sprawl was applied by visual interpretation via supervised classification, on-screen digitizing and post classification change detection technique. The urban thematic layer and the land capability map using GIS made it possible to highlight the hazards of urban growth on the soils that have high capability. The obtained results showed that the overall increase of urban area amounted to 28 Km(2).(210% of the urban area) during the study from 1984 to 2016. The urban area growth throughout the 1984 - 2016 was on the expense of the soils that have good capability with amount of 18 km(2) (4 % of the good capability soil area). While the soils with fair capability lost 9 km(2) had 4 % of the fair capability soil area. The urban area growth over the noncapable soils (barren land) was very large during the 1984 and 2002 period, where it has been amounted to 11 km(2) was converted to urban. The urban sprawl pattern has been changed during the period from 2002 to 2016, where very partial area amounted to(1km(2)) of the noncapablesoils (barren land) was changed to urban area. It could be summarized that the urban sprawl represents one of the main soil loss and degradation processesin the Nile delta.