Peri-Urban Green Areas and the Landscape Transformation in the Case of MENA Region

Peri-Urban greens are defined as transitional zones where the rural areas of land located outside the densely populated urban areas transform into urban forms of lands where it becomes more populated regarding the change in the land use which are mainly located between the outskirts of urban regional centers and rural environments. The study of the Peri-Urban greens takes place in the MENA region which refers to the Middle east and North Africa where countries share similarities in the culture, economic and environmental factors. Looking back through history, the MENA region has been suffering from an uncontrolled growth of the urban expansion that tackled the transformation of the land use and threatened the rural areas which remained as an ongoing issue until today. In order to fill this gap, this study investigates a structured review of evaluating and comparing the landscape transformation based on two main pillars of analysis: 1) Investigating the landscape transformation through studying the development of the lands and 2) identifying the landscape change by studying the socio-cultural identity of the lands using examples of mapping system methodologies. All pillars of analysis are applied on areas of study with different scales of assessment; the regional scale which compares the impact of urban/rural growth on the landscape state between two selected countries (Egypt from the North African side and Jordan from the Middle Eastern side) and the city scale which is based on comparing two categories of cities; the comparison between the capitals (Amman and Cairo) and two selected cities located next to water resources (Luxor in Egypt and Aqaba in Jordan). This research paper detects the urbanization dynamics of the four selected cities and its impact on the land use and land cover transformations and the effect of changing the scales of analysis on the result of the comparison. The study contributes and results in implementing the level of landscape change in relation to the rapid urbanized areas by reinforcing the cultural importance of the city center and observing the urban sprawl moving toward the rural areas. Moreover, studying the nexus between the city and the water surface and enhance the quality of natural and green spaces. It is essential to study the percentages of green spaces, agricultural lands with the urbanized areas

Evaluating the Effects of Human Activity over the Last Decades on the Soil Organic Carbon Pool Using Satellite Imagery and GIS Techniques in the Nile Delta Area, Egypt

The study aims to clarify the relationship between soil organic carbon (SOC) and human activity under arid conditions, in the east area of the Nile Delta, Egypt. SOC is one of the critical factors in food production and plays an important role in the climate change because it affects the physio-chemical soil characteristics, plant growth, and contributes to sustainable development on global levels. For the purpose of our investigations, 120 soil samples (0–30 cm) were collected throughout different land uses and soil types of the study area. Multiple linear regressions (MLR) were used to investigate the spatiotemporal relationship of SOC, soil characteristics, and environmental factors. Remote sensing data acquired from Landsat 5 TM in July 1995 and operational land imager (OLI) in July 2018 were used to model SOC pool. The results revealed significant variations of soil organic carbon pool (SOCP) among different soil textures and land-uses. Soil with high clay content revealed an increase in the percentage of soil organic carbon, and had mean SOCP of 6.08 ± 1.91 Mg C ha−1, followed by clay loams and loamy soils. The higher values of SOCP were observed in the northern regions of the study area. The phenomenon is associated with the expansion of the human activity of initiating fish ponds that reflected higher values of SOC that were related to the organic additions used as nutrients for fish. Nevertheless, the SOC values decreased in southeast of the study area with the decrease of soil moisture contents and the increase in the heavy texture profiles. As a whole, our findings pointed out that the human factor has had a significant impact on the variation of soil organic carbon values in the Eastern Nile Delta from 1995 to 2018. As land use changes from agricultural activity to fish ponds, the SOCP significantly increased. The agriculture land-use revealed higher SOCP with 60.77 Mg C ha−1 in clay soils followed by fish ponds with 53.43 Mg C ha−1. The results also showed a decrease in SOCP values due to an increasing in land surface temperature (LST) thus highlighting that influence of temperature and ambient soil conditions linked to land-use changes have a marked impact on surface SOCP and C sequestration

Google earth engine as multi-sensor open-source tool for supporting the preservation of archaeological areas: The case study of flood and fire mapping in metaponto, italy

In recent years, the impact of Climate change, anthropogenic and natural hazards (such as earthquakes, landslides, floods, tsunamis, fires) has dramatically increased and adversely affected modern and past human buildings including outstanding cultural properties and UNESCO heritage sites. Research about protection/monitoring of cultural heritage is crucial to preserve our cultural properties and (with them also) our history and identity. This paper is focused on the use of the open-source Google Earth Engine tool herein used to analyze flood and fire events which affected the area of Metaponto (southern Italy), near the homonymous Greek-Roman archaeological site. The use of the Google Earth Engine has allowed the supervised and unsupervised classification of areas affected by flooding (2013–2020) and fire (2017) in the past years, obtaining remarkable results and useful information for setting up strategies to mitigate damage and support the preservation of areas and landscape rich in cultural and natural heritage

A Web GIS-based Integration of 3D Digital Models with Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage Exploration

This PhD project explores how geospatial semantic web concepts, 3D web-based visualisation, digital interactive map, and cloud computing concepts could be integrated to enhance digital cultural heritage exploration; to offer long-term archiving and dissemination of 3D digital cultural heritage models; to better interlink heterogeneous and sparse cultural heritage data. The research findings were disseminated via four peer-reviewed journal articles and a conference article presented at GISTAM 2020 conference (which received the ‘Best Student Paper Award’)

Cultural heritage management using analysis of satellite images and advanced GIS techniques at East Luxor, Egypt and Kangavar, Iran (a comparison case study)

Nowadays; the new technology like remote sensing techniques play an important role in cultural heritage management. Urban and agriculture crawling have become a universal problem in the developing countries like Egypt and Iran. This study deals with the spatial characterization over three times 1963, 1984 and 2017 of the buildup and vegetation indices around two important areas; east Luxor (Egypt) and Kangavar (Iran). For the both of investigated sites, environmental changes will detect using satellite Images indices in Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery and Sentinel 2 2016 available for free charge from the USGS Earth Explorer. The past and current urban and agricultural areas have been extracted by using consolidated remote sensing and GIS techniques. Analyses and quantification of the spatial dimension of the urban expansion show for both of the study sites in a significant percentage. As a whole, outputs from our investigations will clearly highlight of the environmental monitoring, and detect the changes between the indices of the both areas to observe and quantify urban and land use changes from a global view down to a local scale to protect the archaeological areas