Assessment of agricultural expansion and its impact on land surface temperature in El-Beheira Governorate, Egypt

Abstract

This paper aims to determine and classify the land cover and assess the impact of agriculture expansion on the land surface temperature (LST) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) in El-Beheira Governorate, Egypt. To achieve these objectives, the multi-temporal Landsat 5 and 8 satellites images for nine different dates were obtained every five years during 1985–2020. Four land cover categorize of agriculture, urban, desert and water lands were distinguished and mapped using the supervised maximum likelihood classification technique in ArcGIS Desktop 10.6. The created land cover maps illustrate a significant expansion in agriculture from 4212 to 7523 km2 (nearly 473 km2 every five years). The desert area decreased from 5417 to 1817 km2 (about 514 km2 every five years) during 1985–2020. The latitudinal variation for LST and NDVI demonstrated that they have a strong negative correlation (R < -95% and R2 > 91%) across all selected dates. The highest positive values for NDVI corresponded to the lowest values for LST over agricultural lands and reversed over desert areas. Where, the relative impacts of agriculture, desert, urban and water on LST (45.1, 50, 4.8 and 0.1% respectively) reveals that the vegetation and desert represents the most significant land cover categorize that determinantes the spatial and temporal distributions of NDVI and LST.