Ahmed Harb Rabia | Damanhour University (original) (raw)

Papers by Ahmed Harb Rabia

We provide a global extent of planted trees landscapes (aggregated land use classes of planted fo... more We provide a global extent of planted trees landscapes (aggregated land use classes of planted forest, woody plantations and agroforestry). The layer has binary value and represents the status for the year 2015 at a spatial resolution of 100 m. The layer has been derived from a global forest management map produced by the Nature Map project (https://naturemap.earth/). The description of the methodology could be found here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3933966

The change detection of land use land cover provides decision makers with essential information t... more The change detection of land use land cover provides decision makers with essential information to environmental management. This study aims to assess the changes of different land use land cover classes for the Northwest coast of Egypt during the period from 2003 to 2022 using remote sensing and GIS techniques. For this purpose, two ASTER images (2003 and 2010) and two sentinal-2 images (2016 and 2022) were downloaded and used. The visual interpretation classification method was used in ArcGIS software for images classification. Ground check of image classification was elaborated by Google earth and field observations. The results indicated that the elevation ranges from zero to 151 m Above Sea Level, most of the studied area lied in the flat sloping class. The area had no dominant aspect class. The changes of land cover use, 2003 to 2022, reflected by a steady increase of agricultural and urban areas vs a continuous decrease in bare soil and carbonate rocks. The agricultural soil increased from 2.32% (1494.87 ha) to 47.47% (30616.72 ha), whereas urban areas increased from 3.45% (2223.07 ha) to 6.12% (3946.07 ha), also salt marshes increased from 0.44% (238.11 ha) to 0.74% (477.41 ha). This increase was on the count of bare soil decreasing by 51.50% and carbonate rocks by 0.76. As for, greenhouses class was not found in the study area until 2016, but it appeared in 2022 as a new project

EnviroInfo (2), 2016

Land capability assessment is a coherent and orderly method of determining the ability of land to... more Land capability assessment is a coherent and orderly method of determining the ability of land to sustain a specific use and level of management, without causing significant long-term degradation. In this work, land capability classification method has been used in Kilte Awulaelo-Ethiopia to estimate different land capability classes. Different parameters related to topography, environmental conditions and soils have been obtained through remote sensing and GIS applications along with filed surveys in order to achieve capability classes. The results showed that in the Kilte Awulaelo District, no land units have been categorized as class V and VIII. The total area of land that is suitable for rainfed, irrigated agriculture and open vegetation growth (I, II, III and IV) is around 67% of the study area. On the other hand, classes suitable for grazing or afforestation (VI and VII) represent less than 29% of the total area. In addition, the land utilization intensity map showed that the majority of the study area is properly utilized. The study demonstrated the capacity of the remote sensing and GIS applications in land capability assessment studies.

EnviroInfo (2), 2016

Salinization is one of the major soil threats all around the globe. It affects the soil suitabili... more Salinization is one of the major soil threats all around the globe. It affects the soil suitability for agriculture production and the quality and quantity of the final yields. Among many factors, salinization is connected to irrigation system type and irrigation water quality. Due to the global water scarcity problem, modernization of irrigation systems is in need to increase water use efficiency. This study aims to model salinization formation in the Nile delta of Egypt and to simulate the effect of irrigation system conversion from surface to drip irrigation (modernization). Simile, a modeling software, has been used to build a dynamic salinization model and to run the simulation process. Simulation results showed that irrigation water salinity is a controlling factor of salt accumulation in soil especially in case of high mixing of drainage water and irrigation water. Results revealed also that converting to drip irrigation increased salinization to alarming levels, due to the great abatement of salts leaching which used to happen in the traditional surface irrigation process. This proposes that modernization is not always the right decision. The study demonstrated that simulation is an excellent tool to predict the impacts of changes in soil dynamics. Also, this study has illustrated the importance of modeling and simulation to planners and decision-makers.

Scientific Data

During December 2020, a crowdsourcing campaign to understand what has been driving tropical fores... more During December 2020, a crowdsourcing campaign to understand what has been driving tropical forest loss during the past decade was undertaken. For 2 weeks, 58 participants from several countries reviewed almost 115 K unique locations in the tropics, identifying drivers of forest loss (derived from the Global Forest Watch map) between 2008 and 2019. Previous studies have produced global maps of drivers of forest loss, but the current campaign increased the resolution and the sample size across the tropics to provide a more accurate mapping of crucial factors leading to forest loss. The data were collected using the Geo-Wiki platform (www.geo-wiki.org) where the participants were asked to select the predominant and secondary forest loss drivers amongst a list of potential factors indicating evidence of visible human impact such as roads, trails, or buildings. The data described here are openly available and can be employed to produce updated maps of tropical drivers of forest loss, wh...

Scientific Data

Spatially explicit information on forest management at a global scale is critical for understandi... more Spatially explicit information on forest management at a global scale is critical for understanding the status of forests, for planning sustainable forest management and restoration, and conservation activities. Here, we produce the first reference data set and a prototype of a globally consistent forest management map with high spatial detail on the most prevalent forest management classes such as intact forests, managed forests with natural regeneration, planted forests, plantation forest (rotation up to 15 years), oil palm plantations, and agroforestry. We developed the reference dataset of 226 K unique locations through a series of expert and crowdsourcing campaigns using Geo-Wiki (https://www.geo-wiki.org/). We then combined the reference samples with time series from PROBA-V satellite imagery to create a global wall-to-wall map of forest management at a 100 m resolution for the year 2015, with forest management class accuracies ranging from 58% to 80%. The reference data set a...

Scientific Data, 2022

Several global high-resolution built-up surface products have emerged over the last five years, t... more Several global high-resolution built-up surface products have emerged over the last five years, taking full advantage of open sources of satellite data such as Landsat and Sentinel. However, these data sets require validation that is independent of the producers of these products. To fill this gap, we designed a validation sample set of 50 K locations using a stratified sampling approach independent of any existing global built-up surface products. We launched a crowdsourcing campaign using Geo-Wiki (https://www.geo-wiki.org/) to visually interpret this sample set for built-up surfaces using very high-resolution satellite images as a source of reference data for labelling the samples, with a minimum of five validations per sample location. Data were collected for 10 m sub-pixels in an 80 × 80 m grid to allow for geo-registration errors as well as the application of different validation modes including exact pixel matching to majority or percentage agreement. The data set presented i...

Soil map is one of the basic tools for planning any agricultural development. Soil maps are even ... more Soil map is one of the basic tools for planning any agricultural development. Soil maps are even more effective and productive for natural resources evaluation. Moreover, remote sensing and geographical information systems (GIS) have added different concepts and enforcements to soil classification. This study aimed to produce soil maps following different classification systems (Soil Taxonomy and the World Reference Base for Soil Resources) and to define the spatial distribution and characteristics of the soil in the study area, which is deemed indispensable for any future development planning. This work was part of the 29th Professional Master Course at the Istituto Agronomico per l’Oltremare (IAO), Florence, Italy. The study was carried out in the Kilte Awulaelo district, located in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. The area is characterized by different topographies and geomorphologies with diverse agro-ecological conditions. Eleven main soil groups and sixty soil types were identif...

Accurate and rapid estimation of stand count is crucial to determine plant emergence rates for si... more Accurate and rapid estimation of stand count is crucial to determine plant emergence rates for site-specific management, such as decision support for replanting. This study assessed the application of high-resolution unmanned aerial system (UAS) imagery in quantifying early-season cotton stand count. A UAV system equipped with an RGB camera was used to acquire images of a cotton research field 10 days after planting. Twelve vegetation indices derived from the red, green, and blue bands of the orthomosaic image were used. These vegetation indices are the Visible-band Difference Vegetation Index (VDVI), Visible Atmospherically Resistant Index (VARI), Normalized Green-Red Difference Index (NGRDI), Red-Green Ratio Index (RGRI), Modified Green Red Vegetation Index (MGRVI), Excess Green Index (ExG), Excess Red Index (ExR), Excess Blue Index (ExB), Excess Green minus Excess Red Index (ExGR), woebbecke Index (WI...

Zinc is an essential nutrient element for plants, animals and Humans. It is involved in several b... more Zinc is an essential nutrient element for plants, animals and Humans. It is involved in several biochemical reactions in plant and its deficiency causes low crop yields. Zinc deficiency is common in many soil types, in general, and its correction is costly because of the wide area of cultivated lands suffering of Zn deficiency. Different plant species as well as plant genotypes differ in their response to low Zn growth substrates. The efficiency of plant genotypes to be grown in low Zn or Zn-deficient growth medium is of a great economic ...

Aerial photography is an important source of high resolution remotely sensed data. Before 1970, a... more Aerial photography is an important source of high resolution remotely sensed data. Before 1970, aerial photographs were the only remote sensing data source for land use and land cover classification. Using these old aerial photographs improve the final output of land use and land cover change detection. However, classic techniques of aerial photographs classification like manual interpretation or screen digitization require great experience, long processing time and vast effort. A new technique needs to be developed in order to reduce processing time and effort and to give better results. Geographic object based image analysis (GEOBIA) is a newly developed area of Geographic In-formation Science and remote sensing in which automatic segmentation of images into objects of similar spectral, temporal and spatial characteristics is undertaken. Unlike pixel-based technique, GEOBIA deals with the object properties such as texture, square fit, roundness and many other properties that can i...

In an ecosystem, there is need to establish the quantity and quality of resources and their suita... more In an ecosystem, there is need to establish the quantity and quality of resources and their suitability for a certain range of land uses in order to assure its future productivity and sustainability of biodiversity. Parametric methods are widely used for land suitability evaluation. A new parametric concept "equation" of land suitability evaluation has been proposed to improve results of land suitability evaluation. Land suitability assessment for wheat production was conducted in order to compare results of the suggest method with classical parametric methods. Organic matter, CaCO3, pH, Slope, texture, drainage, depth, EC and altitude were recognized as factors affecting land suitability for wheat production in the study area. Comparing results of the three parametric methods used showed that the proposed equation gave higher suitability index values than classical methods. Great correlation has been found between results of the three methods. Organic matter, topology and pH were found to be the limiting factors for wheat production in the study area. Generally, the proposed equation may improve land suitability assessment process and gives better realistic results.

ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2014

Introduction Spatially explicit information about land cover is of fundamental importance for man... more Introduction Spatially explicit information about land cover is of fundamental importance for many applications including nature protection and biodiversity, forest and water management, urban and transport planning, natural hazard prevention and mitigation, and the evaluation of agricultural policies. The importance of global land cover is recognized through its status as an essential climate variable (GCOS, 2013), where this information serves as a critical input to the monitoring of climate change. Global land cover forms a key input to large scale economic land use models (e.g. Havlik et al., 2011), which are used to determine important quantities such as the amount of land available for agricultural expansion, afforestation projects and biofuel production or whether reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) are the most cost-effective solutions. A critical gap in accurate land cover and land use, which is needed to monitor ecosystem services and change over time, has also been highlighted recently by Tallis et al. (2012). A number of different coarse to medium resolution global land cover products exist, e.g. the GLC2000 (Fritz et al., 2003), MODIS (Friedl et al., 2010) and GlobCover (Bicheron et al., 2008). These products, which vary from 1 km to 300 m resolution at the equator, have been developed using data from different satellite sensors and using different classification algorithms with varying degrees of automation. Although the published accuracies of these products vary between 68.5% and 74.8%, recent studies have shown that when these maps are compared, there are significant amounts of spatial disagreement across different land cover types, in particular in the cropland and forest domains even when taking semantic differences in the legend definitions into account (Fritz and See, 2008; Fritz et al., 2011a). Research has also shown that model outcomes can vary significantly when different land cover products are used in the same modelling exercise (Quaife et al., 2008; Seebach et al., 2011) while Fritz et al. (2012a) have demonstrated the value associated with reducing the uncertainty in land cover with regards to the cost of different climate mitigation options. With the opening up of the Landsat archive (Wulder et al., 2012), one of the most recent trends in global land cover mapping has been to produce higher resolution products, i.e. at 30 m (Gong et al., 2013; Yu et al., 2013b), with others currently in the pipeline by groups in China and the USA. The accuracies of these recently produced 30 m products range from 63.7% to 66.0%. The technology and algorithms for classifying Landsat will undoubtedly improve in the future, and there will be new higher resolution sensors coming online soon where the data will be freely available (e.g. Sentinel II). Moreover, there are other multitemporal and/or multi-sensor classification efforts ongoing (Lu et al., 2011; Roy et al., 2010). Despite this relatively positive outlook for land cover mapping in the future, there is still an urgent need for better land cover maps at the present time. Medium resolution products are also still extremely useful from a modelling and assessment point of view where the issue is not one of needing to improve the resolution for many applications but simply improving the accuracy. One method which can be used to address this issue of accuracy is to merge existing land cover maps to create an integrated or hybrid product where the resulting accuracy should be higher than the accuracies of the individual products. Data fusion and soft computing are domains which are based on the integration of data from a variety of sources (e.g. from different sensors, models or approaches) so this idea is not new in itself. For example, Jung et al. (2006) developed a fuzzy agreement scoring method to determine the synergies between global land cover products for modelling the carbon cycle while Fritz et al. (2011b)

EnviroInfo (2), 2016

Scientific Data

Scientific Data, 2022

ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2014

Of the most important problems that face humans in the current era, is the access to clean, healt... more Of the most important problems that face humans in the current era, is the access to clean, healthy and safe food. This is a result of the widespread use of fertilizers and pesticides in agriculture and which led to the contamination of the soil and made it pathological environment. For this reason scientists were always looking for better methods to produce healthy and secure food. From here came the idea of cultivation without soil (Hydroponics) in order to get rid of this problem and get the clean food. The beauty of hydroponic systems that it can be used in the narrowest places and without any need for agricultural soil. The system can be placed on the terrace or on rooftops or in the house back garden, and thereby produce healthy, safe and fresh food from the system to your salad dish directly. Hydroponic is the science of growing plants without soil as a supporting and nutrients supplier medium. Nutrient film technique (NFT) system is one of the hydroponic divisions. Basically, NFT is a continuous stream of nutrient solution pumped from a solution container and flows over the plant roots and then proceeds back to the container. The idea of NFT is simple; the plant roots develop on a surface that has a maximum of 1 mm of nutrient solution flowing gradually across it. The term “Nutrient Film Technique” is used as the nutrients solution is moving as a film on the bottom of a plane surface. The Advantages of the nutrient film technique in glasshouse crop production are countless. For instance, low capital cost, Rapid turnaround between crops, Simplicity of installation and operation, precise control of nutrient, Conservation of water by use of a cyclic system rather than an open system and easy adjustment of nutrient solution. Generally speaking, NFT system is cheap to run, simple to operate, needs little maintenance, and commonly problem free. NFT is a very good technique for both beginners, and highly developed growers.

Since the first emergence of life forms on earth, differences between species has always been lin... more Since the first emergence of life forms on earth, differences between species has always been linked to the geographical distribution and environmental variation. Whereas, some species have developed in certain regions and did not appear in others as a result of many factors related to the geographical locations and environmental conditions of these regions. Therefore, genetics has always been connected to geography science. With the onset of geographic information systems (GIS) science, Genetics was one of the first sciences used GIS applications in its studies. With the time and scientific development, the GIS applications used in genetic studies have evolved. The first known case of the GIS framework for disease control was in 1858 when John snow stopped the spread of Cholera near the Broad Street pump in London by studying the pattern of the disease and led him to disable the well pump by removing its handle. However, it was two decades earlier (1838) when Charles Darwin, developed his formulation of the species evolution using observations on location-based phenotypic variation (genotype related) in plants, snails, birds and other species. This was the first example of the genetic GIS framework. Until very recently, genetic data was neither available nor geographically-referenced on wide scale. Nowadays, there are many applications and software connecting genetics with GIS. One of the examples of these applications is the DIVA-GIS software. DIVA-GIS software allows analyses of genebank and herbarium databases to elucidate genetic, ecological and geographic patterns in the distribution of crops and wild species. Another success story of the tying between GIS and Genetics is the Genesys PGR (Plant Genetic Resources) global portal. Genesys PGR is a free online global portal which allows the exploration of the world's crop