Monitoring the urbanization of the Nile Delta, Egypt

Ambio

Volumn 28, Issue 7, 1999, Pages 628-631

  Sultan, Mohamed ^a,b,c   Fiske, Michael ^a   Stein, Thomas ^d,e   Gamal, Mohamed ^f   Hady, Yehia Abdel ^f   El Araby, Hesham ^f   Madani, Ahmed ^f   Mehanee, Salah ^f   Becker, Richard ^a  

^a ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO   (United States)

^c CAIRO UNIVERSITY   (Egypt)

^d UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

^e WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^f CAIRO UNIVERSITY   (Egypt)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

LAND USE; MONITORING; REMOTE SENSING; URBANIZATION;

EGYPT;

EID: 0033390148     PISSN: 00447447     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. Brown, L.R. and Kane, H. 1994. Full House: Reassessing the Earth's Population Carrying Capacity. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, USA.
2. Geological Survey of Egypt and Mining Authority, 1981. Geologic Map of Egypt, scale: 1:2,000,000. Cairo, Egypt.
3. Davis, K. and Bernstam, M.S., 1991. Resources, Environment, and Population: Present Knowledge, Future. Oxford University Press, New York, USA.
4. Said, R. 1993. The River Nile, Geology, Hydrology, ami Utilization. Pergamon Press, New York, USA.
5. Acquisition dates for the four 1990 TM scenes were August 4, August 4, May 15, and August 3. The four 1984 TM scenes were acquired on July 2, July 2, September 11, and September 11 of 1984. Acquisition dates for the three 1972 MSS scenes were August 31, August 3, and September 12 of 1972.
6. Adjacent scenes acquired on different dates were normalized by histogram matching to the scenes with the least (relatively darker) atmospheric contribution. Other scenes acquired on the same day were not normalized during mosaicking. Individual scenes in the case of TM scenes and individual quadrants in the case of MSS scenes were coregistered (by nearest neighbor resampling) onto the TM 1990 mosaic by using control points. Because detailed and precise land use maps of appropriate scales are not available for the entire Delta, ground control points were selected from the 1990 reference TM mosaic. Coregistration of the TM and MSS scenes is adequate (<1 picture element), as attested by the low root mean square (RMS) values (range: 0.7-0.75 for TM scenes; 0.51-0.88 for MSS quadrants) and the number of ground control points (range: 13-16 for TM scenes; 11-19 for MSS quadrants).
7. Our attempts to use supervised classification techniques (e.g., minimum distance classifier, parallelepiped classifier, maximum likelihood classifier) to estimate the area occupied by cities and villages from the individual 1972, 1984, and 1990 mosaics were unsuccessful. We identified representative prototype pixels from single or various combinations of TM or MSS bands and searched for similar picture elements within each of the mosaics, scenes, or subscenes. Because urban areas and barren fields are spectrally indistinguishable, approximately 30% to 80% of the large, harvested (bright, barren) fields were misclassified as urban depending on the chosen band(s) and/or classification technique.
8. Virtually identical results (masks) were obtained, if narrower ranges (> 90- < 110% of the brightness value of typical picture elements) were adopted; increasingly larger areas were classified as urban on the mask image as broader ranges were used. This observation indicates that broader ranges probably introduce classification errors, whereas the chosen and narrower ranges successfully classify the urban and agricultural land. The narrower range, however, requires additional selection of test sites and searches for similar picture elements.
9. Lenney, M.P., Woodcock, C.E., Collins, J.B. and Hamdi, H. 1996. The status of agricultural lands in Egypt: The use of multitemporal NDVI features derived from Landsat TM. Remote Sensing Environ. 56, 8-20.
10. Acknowledgments: We thank professors Mofeed Shehab, Farouk Ismail, and Hasanein Rabeeh for their efforts to facilitate cooperative scientific research between Cairo University and Argonne National Laboratory. We thank the Ambio reviewers for the comments and suggestions they provided. Efforts at Argonne National Laboratory supported by Cairo University through U.S. Department of Energy contract W-31-109-Eng-38.
11. First submitted 28 September 1998. Accepted for publication after revision 8 April 1999.