Monitoring of Agriculture land in Egypt using NOAA-AVHRR and SPOT Vegetation data

Land cover change detection is one of the most important trends in which remote sensing data could be used to assist strategists and the planners to decide the best land use policy. Two images of NOAA-AVHRR and SPOT vegetation acquired in November 1992 and 2002 were used to assess the changes of Agricultural lands in Egypt. A supervised classification together with two change images derived from classification result and NDVI were used to evaluate the trend and form of the change. It was found that agricultural areas increased by about 14.3 % during the study period in particular around the River Nile Delta and near the Northern Lakes of Egypt. The new cultivated lands were extracted mainly from the desert and from the salt marches areas. At the same time, parts of the agricultural lands were turned into non-cultivated land because of the urban expansion and soil degradation.