Monitoring of Land Use and Land Cover Change Detection Using Multi-temporal Remote Sensing and Time Series Analysis of Qena-Luxor Governorates (QLGs), Egypt

Abstract

In recent years, rapid land use land cover (LULC) changes have continuously taken place in many regions all over the world as a result of human activities. In the present study, the changes in LULC were analyzed by means of multi-temporal remote sensing of Qena-Luxor Governorates in Egypt between 1984 and 2018. In order to map and monitor the land use land cover changes, several remotely sensed data were applied to create multi-maps using (1) the normalized difference vegetation index and (2) supervised classification of Landsat images using field chick and accuracy assessment, including field verification and Google Earth Professional. Therefore, the lands in the study area can be classified as follows: (1) agricultural lands, (2) built-up areas, (3) water bodies, (4) reclaimed lands, and (5) desert lands. The results indicate that agricultural lands grew from an average of 1238.7 km2 (9.8%) in 1984 to 1707.04 km2 (13.40%) in 2018 and urban lands increased from 345.2 km2 (2.7%) in 1984 to 445.28 km2 (3.5%) in 2019. Furthermore, the reclaimed lands increased approximately from 4379.7 km2 in 1984 (i.e., 34.4% of the total study area) to 4521.05 km2 in 2000 (35.507%). However, this class was followed by a marked decline to 4373.51 km2 (34.35%) between 2000 and 2010 and then increased to approximately 4442 km2 (34.89%) between 2010 and 2018. Desert lands (limestone plateau and some lowland desert fringes) decreased from 6635.4 km2 (52.2%) to 6003.5 km2 (47.15%). The results showed that the overall accuracy of the supervised classification of Landsat satellite images ranges from 87 to 92.5% while kappa statistics were from 0.83 to 90.