Agro-ecological zones delineation based for agricultural development in Sinai Peninsula using geo-informatics techniques

Abstract

Agricultural development faces many obstacles, such as soil drought, climate change, and human activities, but the main challenge facing Egypt today is the need to develop and better manage natural resources to meet the growing needs of the country. This study aims to map Sinai agro-ecological zones to find out the most suitable environmental condition to growth, development and productivity of agricultural corps using geo-informatics techniques. Nine ground agro-meteorological stations distributed over the study area were used to collect the climatic data from 1986 to 2015. Also, the physiochemical properties of soil were determined. The land capability was carried out using ALES-arid. Model builder with integration of GIS based on an approach using DEM, landsat-8 satellite data, soil analysis and climatic data were utilized to evaluate the agro-ecological zones for agricultural production. The results indicated that land capability was classified as 2.2% belong to C3 (fair), 8.5% belong to C4 (poor), 11.9% belong to C5 (very poor) and 4.4% fits in C6 (non-agriculture). In addition, the Model builder results showed that the study area comprise five zones; i.e. zone (I) high suitable areas (4.1%), zone (II) suitable area (0.1%), zone (III) moderately suitable (15.7%), zone (IV) marginally suitable (7.2%) and zone (V) non-suitable area (9.1%). It could be concluded that, zones I, II, and III were considered the best suitable zones for agricultural development in Sinai Peninsula.