Mapping and Quantifying the Human-Environment Interactions in Middle Egypt Using Machine Learning and Satellite Data Fusion Techniques

José Manuel Delgado Blasco,Fabio Cian,Ramon F Hanssen,Gert Verstraeten

doi:10.3390/rs12030584

José Manuel Delgado Blasco, Fabio Cian + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12030584

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Abstract

Population growth in rural areas of Egypt is rapidly transforming the landscape. New cities are appearing in desert areas while existing cities and villages within the Nile floodplain are growing and pushing agricultural areas into the desert. To enable control and planning of the urban transformation, these rapid changes need to be mapped with high precision and frequency. Urban detection in rural areas in optical remote sensing is problematic when urban structures are built using the same materials as their surroundings. To overcome this limitation, we propose a multi-temporal classification approach based on satellite data fusion and artificial neural networks. We applied the proposed methodology to data of the Egyptian regions of El-Minya and part of Asyut governorates collected from 1998 until 2015. The produced multi-temporal land cover maps capture the evolution of the area and improve the urban detection of the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative Sentinel-2 Prototype Land Cover 20 m map of Africa and the Global Human Settlements Layer from the Joint Research Center (JRC). The extension of urban and agricultural areas increased over 65 km2 and 200 km2, respectively, during the entire period, with an accelerated increase analysed during the last period (2010–2015). Finally, we identified the trends in urban population density as well as the relationship between farmed and built-up land.

Highlights

Over the 25 years, the world’s population growth is expected to be concentrated in urban conglomerates within the developing world [1]
The accuracy of the land use and land cover maps is expressed in the confusion matrix, see Table 4
We put together all the datasets shown in Table 7. to visually compare the urban extent over two smaller areas contained within our study area, one over El-Minya City and surroundings (Figure 9) and the second one over Mallawi and surroundings (Figure 10), from where it was possible to obtain additional information regarding old urban extent and modern cemeteries from Willems et al [55]

Summary

Introduction

Over the 25 years, the world’s population growth is expected to be concentrated in urban conglomerates within the developing world [1]. The challenges in achieving sustainable urban development will be significant in Africa [2,3]. Urban sprawl resulted in the loss of fertile soil for agricultural food production in the Egyptian Nile Valley. From the time of the 1996 population census onwards, the policy of the Egyptian government has been to avoid new constructions in the Nile floodplain, encouraging people to live outside the so-called ‘green land’ by settling in the arid areas of the eastern and western desert plateau [4]. Many studies have focused on urban sprawl for major centers around the globe [6,7,8], including Africa [1,9,10]. Increasing urbanization of the rural areas in the hinterland of major urban centers is less studied [11,12]

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