Egypt is located in an arid to semi-arid zone. The inhabited area constitutes only 4% of the total area of the country (1 million km2), and the rest is desert. Its only source of water, the River Nile, provides more than 95% of all water available to the country .Most of the population of Egypt (over 60% million) are associated with the agricultural sector which constitutes 20% of gross national products and consumes about 80% of the water budget.
Geographic and earth observation data play an important role, by providing global, neutral and multi-theme information regarding coastal arid zones. The general objective of this study is to develop a comprehensive method for the study of the water body’s use i.e. lakes and the resistance to the drought of the natural and irrigated vegetation in some areas in Egypt, by means of a combined historical and current space-based remote sensing database, vegetation models and field measurements.
Being at the coastal arid lands, lagoons constitute a finely balanced ecotonal environment. Here, the ecological effects of small inter-annual fluctuations in salinity and other environmental variables can be exacerbated by land-use activities and climate change and transformed into major ecosystem change trends.
The work plan structure includes the collection of high quality environmental data from monitoring and from spatial survey (including water and soil quality), identification of aquatic ecosystem linkages and attributes, hydrology, environmental reconstruction and plant-environment interactions, data analysis and modeling with applications to integrated coastal arid lands management. There are a series of tasks will use common methodologies and satellite images techniques then to check and verify on-going analyses.
1. Collection of baseline information in the study area.
2: Collection of a soil characteristics to assess and infill patterns and bottom contamination.
3: Collection of good quality data (essential for the development, calibration and validation of the dynamic models for the water bodies’ environment.
4: Using of remote sensing techniques to capture the full spatial scale of variations in aquatic ecosystem cover and in open water area and some aspects of water quality.
5: Assessment of the future forcing factors that influence inputs and boundary conditions in the coastal arid lands. Those factors related to agricultural intensification, water diversion and/or urbanization of the area surrounding the study site which impact model boundary conditions will be assessed.
6: suggest future predictive capabilities for testing management scenarios and other potential changes.
Division : Agriculture Applications, Soils, and Marine
Prof : Sameh Bakr EL Sayed EL Kafrawy