Agricultural Fragmentation of the Nile Delta; A Modeling Approach to Measuring Agricultural Land Deterioration in Egyptian Nile Delta

Abstract

Abstract In today's world with its scarce resources, Sufficient and suitable food production is considered a big challenge, with almost two thirds of the world population experiencing a critical food deficit and more than third of the world soil suffering from degradation which is primarily caused by Land-use and Land-cover Changes (LUCC). And the most striking human-induced land transformation of the current era is that of urbanization. The Nile Delta is the last stretch of the world's longest river and one of the oldest deltas with highly fertile and productive agricultural soils, it is – at the same time – one of the most extensive urban networks worldwide housing almost 50% of the Egyptian population. An urban network that has a high rate of growth, corresponding to high losses of fertile agricultural soil and an overall highly fragmented landscape fabric. The Nile Delta is a complex diverse landscape entity consisting of a lot of different and sometimes contradicting elements with complex interactions between each other and affected by various external factors (e.g.: sea water intrusion in the underground delta aquifer). With an interest in studying the interaction between urban and agriculture landscapes, this paper tackles the exiting situation of the Nile Delta with a focus on the indirect effects of land fragmentation – due to the extensive urban network of cities, villages and connecting roads – on the agricultural aspects of the delta, e.g. the obstruction to the irrigation networks due to excessive fragmentation. The paper proposes in a conceptual manner the steps to build and conceive a model aimed at studying those effects while taking the first steps in performing a systems analysis of the Nile Delta system.