Monitoring urban growth and land use change detection with GIS and remote sensing techniques in Daqahlia governorate Egypt

Urban growth is a worldwide phenomenon but the rate of urbanization is very fast in developing country like Egypt. It is mainly driven by unorganized expansion, increased immigration, rapidly increasing population. In this context, land use and land cover change are considered one of the central components in current strategies for managing natural resources and monitoring environmental changes. In Egypt, urban growth has brought serious losses of agricultural land and water bodies. Urban growth is responsible for a variety of urban environmental issues like decreased air quality, increased runoff and subsequent flooding, increased local temperature, deterioration of water quality, etc. Egypt possessed a number of fast growing cities. Mansoura and Talkha cities in Daqahlia governorate are expanding rapidly with varying growth rates and patterns. In this context, geospatial technologies and remote sensing methodology provide essential tools which can be applied in the analysis of land use change detection. This paper is an attempt to assess the land use change detection by using GIS in Mansoura and Talkha from 1985 to 2010. Change detection analysis shows that built-up area has been increased from 28 to 255 km2 by more than 30% and agricultural land reduced by 33%. Future prediction is done by using the Markov chain analysis. Information on urban growth, land use and land cover change study is very useful to local government and urban planners for the betterment of future plans of sustainable development of the city.