Assessment of urban sprawl on agricultural soil of northern Nile Delta of Egypt using RS and GIS

Urban sprawl is threatening the limited highly fertile land in the Nile delta of Egypt. Landsat TM satellite images of 1984, 1992 and ETM+ of 2006 have been used to study the impact of urban sprawl on agricultural land of the Northern Nile delta, Egypt. Visual interpretation using on screen digitizing and change detection techniques were applied for monitoring the urban sprawl. Combining the land capability map and the urban thematic layer using GIS made it possible to point out the risk of urban expansion on the expense of the highly capable soil class. The results show that a total expansion of urban area amounted to 689.20 km(2) (6.3% of total area) during the study period 1984-2006. The urban expansion during the 1984-2006 was on the expense of the most fertile soils where, the high capable soils (Class I) lost 247.14 km(2) (2.26 % of total area) and the moderate capable soils lost 32.73 km(2) (0.3% of total area), while the low capable soils lost only 57.39 km(2) (0.53% of total area). The urban encroachment over the non capable soils was very limited during the study period 1984-1992, where 7.33 km(2) only was lost. The pattern of urban sprawl has been changed during the 1992 to 2006 whereas much larger area (50.64 km(2)) of the non capable soils was converted to urban. It can be concluded that the urban sprawl is one of the dominant degradation process on the land of Nile Delta.