Monitoring and assessing land use and land cover changes in the Giza District using change detection approach

Abstract

This study aims to monitor and evaluate the change within the land use /land cover patterns in the Giza District. We use the change detection approach associated with satellite imagery data from landsat multispectral. This allows us to extract maps of land use/land cover for long-term observations and mapping of periods between (1987-1997, and 1997-2017). The results for the change-detection analysis are applied by using the maximum likelihood classification for the supervised classification and change detection. These results have been compared between all maps. A dditionally, we divided the study area into five categories during the study period as, the built-up areas, irrigated lands, rain-fed area, rangeland and bareland, and, water, industrial areas and roads. Afterward, we compared the results of the Normalized differences vegetation index (NDVI) with the land cover changes within the agricultural lands, the results showed that there a clear changes in the vegetation cover in terms of density, spread and type. This is due to the change affected to all land uses within the study area. We have showed that the dynamics of the change in land uses was in all periods, this is because the land cover decreased by 15% in the bareland, rangeland and rain-fed lands. While the rangeland area decreased by 3% over the period (1987-2017) with quickly increased by 17.8% in the area of the built-up area in 2017. On the other side, the built-up areas also increased by 2.5% during the period (1987 - 1997). As it turn out, the extracted new housing patterns are appeared, that combined more than one use in one area such as, mixed farms, rural houses, and investment agriculture. Our results showed that, these changes were due to the enhancing of human effects and therefore the effective development policies. This will allow us to follow the development of this region and exploit its resources associated with climatic elements.