Geomorphology and Land Use/Land Cover Change Detection for Eastern Part of Desert Back of Menoufia Governorate

Abstract

The current investigation aims to identifying the geomorphological characteristics of the area east of desert part of Menoufia governorate west of Rashid Nile branch. Change detection of land use/land cover (LULC) classes between the years 2001 and 2020 are also carried out. The integration of Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques were used to perform this work. The studied area is located between latitudes 30° 5' to 30° 32' N and longitudes 30° 30' to 31° 00' E and covers about 1354 km 2 or 322474 feddans. The interpretation of satellite image of the study area indicated that, there are three main identified geomorphic units including seven subunits in this area. These units are 1) Depressions: cover an area of 271 km 2 or 64530 feds (about 20.0% of the total studied area(, 2) Sand Sheets: have 1022 km 2 or 243354 feds (75.3 %), including Low-(40.0 %), Moderate-(24.8 %) and High-Terraces (10.5 %), and 3) Old Deltaic Revere Terraces: have 143 km 2 or 34005 feds (10.5 %), including Low-(2.4 %), Moderate-(1.4 %) and High-Terraces (0.9 %). Binary encoding method was carried out based on classifying the Satellite images using decision tree classifier and statistical relative change detection to identify the relative change detection in (LULC) classes of agricultural land and barren area between 2001 and 2020 from the different Landsat images. The overall changes in LULC classes during this period indicated that, there is an increase in the cultivated area with 12.6% from the total studied area (170.2 km 2 or 40535.6 fed) and shrunk in the baren land with 13.4% (181.2 km 2 or 43155.4 fed).