Spatiotemporal Monitoring of Land Reclamation in the Southeastern Desert, Upper Egypt Using Satellite Data and GIS

The objective of this study was to monitor the reclamation development and assess the LULC changes in a reclaimed area in Upper Egypt. GIS and remote sensing-based multi-temporal Landsat imageries (i.e., Landsat-5 and Landsat-8; 30m) were utilized for mapping and analyzing the spatiotemporal dynamics between 2005 to 2020. Both supervised-based maximum likelihood classifier (MLC) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)-based thresholds were implemented. The results of both methods were cross-compared and showed that the agriculture activities started in 2004 with small and sparse agriculture patches. The bare land occupied more than 65.1% of the total area between 2005-2008. Overall, using the MLC and NDVI-based classification, the authors observed an increase of approximately 455.6% (17,027.7 ha) and 477.2% (16,973.5 ha) over 15 years (2005-2020), respectively. The results could be very useful for assessing the success of the Egyptian strategies to sustain the agricultural land areas and food production through horizontal expansion and investment in the desert areas.