Application of Remotely Sensed Indices to Monitor and Detect the Changes of Land Cover: A Case Study of Abis Area, West Delta, Egypt

          PERIODIC and precise change detection of Earth's surface ……..features is extremely important for understanding relationships and interactions between human and natural phenomena in order to promote better decision making. Land cover changes are of high importance for investigating the processes and patterns of landscape changes over time and the impact of these changes on sustainable development. These changes can be identified by exploiting multitemporal remote sensing images. Abis is an agricultural area having about 40,000 fed. that have been reclaimed in 1960 in two phases, the first phase was estimated at about 32,000 fed. adjacent to El Behira Governorate, then 8,000 fed. in Alexandria Governorate has been reclaimed at the beginning of the twentieth century. Three satellite images have been used in this study, TM 1984, Landsat ETM+7 2005 and ETM+8 2013 to study the land cover changes and their impact on agricultural land in Abis area, West Nile Delta, Egypt. New remote sensing indices were used to study changes of land cover namely NDVI, MNDWI, SAVI, and IBI. The bare soil and urban areas decreased from 5613 fed. in 1984 to 3117 fed. in 2005 due to it’s the date of the second phase of reclaimed area. The bare soil and urban area increased from 3117 fed in 2005 on the other hand to 8264 fed in 2013. This means that more than 20% of the study area transformed from agricultural land to bare soil and urban area at 8 years, this means that we have lost some of the good and productive agricultural land in the period between 2005 and 2013. It is likely that most of this agricultural land will disappear if the continued encroachment on agricultural land remains the same.