Assessment of land use changes and its impact on Agricultural soils in 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 theurban areastretch effect on agricultural lands of the Egyptian Northern Nile Delta has been detected by using Landsat TM,Landsat ETM+and Landsat OLIsatellite images (1984, 2002, and 2016 respectively).Monitoring of urban sprawl was applied by visual interpretation viasupervised classification, on-screen digitizing and post classification change detection technique.The urban thematic layerand the land capability map using GISmade it possible to highlight the hazards of urban growth on the soils that have high capability. The obtained results showed that theoverallincrease of urban area amounted to 28 Km2.(210% of the urban area) during the study from1984 to 2016. The urban areagrowththroughout the 1984 – 2016 was on the expense of the soils that have good capability with amount of 18 km2(4 % of the good capability soil area).While the soils with fair capability lost 9 km2had 4 % of the fair capability soil area.The urban area growth over the noncapable soils (barren land) was very large during the 1984 and 2002period, where it has been amounted to 11 km2 was converted to urban. The urban sprawlpattern has been changed during the period from 2002 to 2016, where very partial area amounted to(1km2) of the noncapablesoils(barren land) was changed to urbanarea.It could be summarized that the urban sprawl represents one of themainsoil loss and degradation processesin theNile delta.