Geospatial Analysis of Agriculture Land Loss in Qena City, Upper Egypt

Abstract

Although urbanization presents opportunities for new urban developments, it may have serious problems on environment and land use/cover patterns. The present study aims to evaluate the performance of built‑up delineation index set (BDIS) for mapping agricultural land loss in Upper Egypt. Three Landsat images were obtained for the years 1986, 2000, and 2016 and utilized as inputs to calculate the BDIS variables. Then a supervised classification technique (i.e., support vector machine) was used to classify the images. The findings showed that urban areas have witnessed a dramatic expansion at a growing rate of 44.1% during the 30 years. As a result, the loss of the agricultural land was found to be approximately 64.83 ha, which represents -4%, during the same period because of the urban expansion and the illegal construction of settlements. These findings would support the local decision makers in urban and agriculture land management authorities to develop sustainable development plans that control the spatiotemporal urban expansion and agricultural land loss.