Assessing the Urban Encroachment Phenomenon in Egypt Using Satellite Imagery [ ]


The agricultural land in Egypt is consistently threatened to diminish by the urban encroachment phenomenon, which extensively occurred after the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. The risk is considered particularly high since the fertile and productive land of Egypt is remarkably scarce and is profoundly shrinking due to the urban infringements. The unstable conditions of the country exceptionally allowed planned and unplanned urban expansion forms to appear more and more. In this research urban expansion is studied by utilizing satellite images with distinctly different resolutions and employing diverse remote sensing classification procedures. The analysis is based on a multi-temporal change detection procedure which identifies the urban expansion in terms of location and areal extent that occurred, comparing the situation before and after the revolution.