Impacts of Human Activities on Urban Sprawl and Land Surface Temperature in Rural Areas, a Case Study of El-Reyad District, Kafrelsheikh Governorate, Egypt

Anthropogenic activities affect the surrounding environment dynamically in different ways. In the arid and hyper arid, agriculture is concentrated in rural communities, which are cooling surfaces that help mitigate surface temperature increases. Recently, rural communities are suffering from increasing urban sprawl. The current work focuses on evaluating the changes in land cover and their impacts on land surface temperature (LST) during (1988–2022) and predicting the changes until 2056 in El-Reyad District, Kafrelsheikh Governorate, Egypt. For achieving this purpose, Landsat images (TM, ETM+, and OLI) were used. The support vector machine (SVM) was applied using Google Earth Engine (GEE) to monitor changes in land use/cover and LST. The prediction of land use until 2056 was achieved using the CA-Markov simulation model. The results showed six land cover classes: agricultural lands, bare lands, urban areas, natural vegetation, Lake Burullus, and fish farms. The results showed the effects of human activity on the conversion of agricultural land to other activities, as agricultural lands have decreased by about 3950.8 acres, while urban areas have expanded by 6283.2 acres, from 1988 to 2022. Fish farms have increased from 3855.6 to 17,612 acres from 1988 to 2022. While the area of bare land decreased from 28.3% to 0.7% of the total area, it was converted to urban, agricultural, and fish farms. The spatiotemporal change in land cover affected the balance of LST in the study area, although the average temperature increased from 32.4 ± 0.5 to 33.6 ± 0.2 °C. In addition, it is expected to reach 36 ± 0.5 °C in 2056, and there are some areas with decreased LST where it is converted from bare areas into fish farms and agricultural uses. The prediction results show that the agricultural area will decrease by −11.38%, the urban area will increase by 4.6%, and the fish farms area will increase by 6.1%. Thus, preserving green spaces and reducing urban sprawl in rural communities are very important objectives

Towards a more comprehensive concept for prebiotics

The essential role of the gut microbiota for health has generated tremendous interest in modulating its composition and metabolic function. One of these strategies is prebiotics, which typically refer to selectively fermented nondigestible food ingredients or substances that specifically support the growth and/or activity of health-promoting bacteria that colonize the gastrointestinal tract. In this Perspective, we argue that advances in our understanding of diet-microbiome-host interactions challenge important aspects of the current concept of prebiotics, and especially the requirement for effects to be 'selective' or 'specific'. We propose to revise this concept in an effort to shift the focus towards ecological and functional features of the microbiota more likely to be relevant for host physiology. This revision would provide a more rational basis for the identification of prebiotic compounds, and a framework by which the therapeutic potential of modulating the gut microbiota could be more fully materialized