Water Management Problems Associated with Urban Sprawl in

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Urban sprawl is one of the major problems that evolved in the Nile Delta as a result of the deficiency in the security system after the 25 th of January revolution in Egypt in 2011. This problem not only threatens the limited fertile lands but also influences the water distribution regime in these areas. For this purpose, three types of satellite images were employed; i.e. Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) 1990, Egyptsat-1 2010 and SPOT 5–2011, to study the urban sprawl and its impact on the agricultural land and water distribution management in Gharbia Governorate. Maximum likelihood supervised classification and post classification change detection techniques were applied for monitoring the urban sprawl in this study area. The accuracy of the classification results was assessed using a 1992 topographic map. Using ancillary data, visual interpretation and expert knowledge of this area through GIS further refined the classification results. Combining the soil an