Remote sensing for monitoring urban expansion in Greater Cairo: A multi-temporal multi-sensor supervised land use classification method

Greater Cairo is increasing in population and in built-up extension in the last decades. Monitoring of new construction works is crucial in this area, since some of the new buildings are threatening the Heritage Cultural Site of the Giza Pyramids. In addition, the fertile land of the Nile floodplain is also being urbanized, despite the government’s prohibition since the 1990s. By using optical and radar satellite remote sensing data it is possible to monitor the urban expansion. However, both single sensor approaches have problems in properly detecting urban features in the rapidly changing environment of Greater Cairo. The solution pointed us towards the integration of active and passive remote sensing datasets. Here we present a new method to detect not only more urban features than other medium resolution sensor approaches, but also construction areas in early stages. This is done by using multitemporal multi-sensor supervised land use classification and including a new land use class for detecting undefined anthropogenic disturbances (UAD). Our results also show the relationship between the detected UAD and the future built-up areas. The total urban extent had increased 81% since 1998 to 2010, and these new built-up areas where detected in both desert and floodplain. This information can be used for predicting the future extension of Greater Cairo. This abstract fits within the APLADYN project: a Belgian Science Policy project on anthropogenic and landscape dynamics in large fluvial systems.