article · Sustainability
Lake Burullus, an internationally recognised wetland in Egypt, provides critical habitat for migrating birds, fish, mammals, and herpetofauna. Moderate-resolution Landsat satellite imagery spanning 35 years, from 1985 to 2020, was used to evaluate long-term marsh loss across the lake. Using unsupervised classification techniques on Landsat 5 and Landsat 8 data, the region was categorised into water, marsh, unvegetated surfaces, and agricultural lands or fish farms with an overall accuracy of 96 percent. The findings reveal a 44.8 percent reduction in marsh aerial coverage over the study period. Wetland conversion and drainage are concentrated heavily in the southern and western sections, where agricultural land and fish farm coverage expanded by 103.2 percent between 2000 and 2020. This substantial ecological decline poses severe risks to local water quality and critical ecosystem services.
Coastal wetlands provide essential ecosystem services, including water filtration and wildlife habitats, but human development often threatens their survival. Tracking long-term land conversion using satellite data highlights rapid environmental decline, helping policy makers and regional agencies understand where protective interventions and public awareness campaigns are most urgently needed to prevent further habitat loss.
The satellite image classification workflow represents an applied remote-sensing approach ready for use by environmental monitoring bodies, conservation organisations, and spatial planners. While the study itself focuses on environmental assessment rather than a commercial product, the demonstrated mapping method can be integrated into existing geographic information systems to support land-use planning and ecological compliance monitoring.
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Lake Burullus is the second largest lake at the northern edge of the Nile Delta, Egypt, and has been recognized as an internationally significant wetland that provides a habitat for migrating birds, fish, herpetofauna, and mammals. However, the lake is experiencing severe human impacts including drainage and conversion to agricultural lands and fish farms. The primary goal of this study was to use multispectral, moderate-spatial-resolution (30 m2) Landsat satellite imagery to assess marsh loss in Lake Burullus, Egypt, in the last 35 years (1985–2020). Iterative Self-Organizing Data Analyses (ISODATA) unsupervised techniques were applied to the Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager–Thermal Infrared Sensor (OLI–TIRS) satellite images for classification of the Lake Burullus area into four main land-use classes: water, marsh, unvegetated land surfaces (roads, paths, sand sheets and dunes), and agricultural lands and fish farms. The overall classification accuracy was estimated to be 96% and the Kappa index was 0.95. Our results indicated that there is a substantial loss (44.8% loss) in the marsh aerial coverage between 1985 and 2020. The drainage and conversion of wetlands into agricultural lands and/or fish farms is concentrated primarily in the western and southern part of the lake where the surface area of the agricultural lands and/or fish farms doubled (103.2% increase) between 2000 and 2020. We recommend that land-use-policy makers and environmental government agencies raise public awareness among the local communities of Lake Burullus of the economic and environmental consequences of the alarming loss of marshland, which will likely have adverse effects on water quality and cause a reduction in the invaluable wetland-ecosystem services.
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DOI: 10.3390/su14094980
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