Assessment of Soil Quality Using Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques in Some Areas of North-East Nile Delta, Egypt

 
        THE STUDY area is located north-east Nile Delta, north …….Ismaillia - south Port Said Governorates on the west side of Suez Canal, with total area approximately of 183136 ha. The water resources in the study area depend on Nile water flowing to the area through El-SalamCanal in the northward of the area meanwhile the southern part is supplied from Ismaillia canal. There are changes between land use/cover feature in investigated area for year 2000 and year 2015. The total area of bare soil are decreasing, about 33799 ha also the total area of urban areas are increasing about 2760 ha also the total area of vegetation are increasing; about 23270 haand the area of water bodies are increasing; about 7770 ha. Soil quality evaluation is a tool to improve soil management and land use system. A large number of different physical, chemical and biological properties of soil, known as soil quality indicators, are used to soil quality assessment. The geo-statistical approaches for GIS were used to produce the spatial variability for soil quality map for the studied area. The final goal of this study is to present soil quality assessment based on properties such as EC, pH, OM, CEC, ESP and CaCO₃. The study derived estimates of soil fertility from the vegetation quality using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Indices (NDVI) obtained from the satellite remote sensing data. High soil quality class occupies small area of the area around (16 %), while the intermediate class occupies 28.5% and low soil quality occupies 55.5 %.