Abstract:With population increase, lack of conventional fresh water resources and uncertainties due to climate change, there is growing interest in the arid and semi-arid areas to increase groundwater recharge with recycled water. Finding the best locations for artificial recharge of groundwater in such areas is one of the most crucial design steps to guarantee the long life and the sustainability of these projects. This study presents two ways to go about performing analysis; creating a suitability map to find out the suitability of every location on the map and another way is querying the created data sets to obtain a Boolean result of true or false map. These techniques have been applied on Sadat Industrial City which is located in a semi arid area in the western desert fringes of The Nile delta in the north west of Egypt. Thematic layers for number of parameters were prepared from some maps and satellite images and they have been classified, weighted and integrated in ArcGIS environment. By the means of the overlay weighted model in ArcGIS a suitability map which is classified into number of priority zones was obtained and it could be compared with the obtained true-false map of Boolean logic. Both methods suggested mostly the northern parts of the city for groundwater recharge; however the weighted model could give more accurate suitability map while Boolean logic suggested wider ranges of areas. This study recommends Boolean logic as a first estimator for locating the best locations as it is easier and not time consuming, while the overlay weighted model for more accurate results.

Much research has tackled the physical expansion of urban growth and concomitant ruralurban transformation of land use in many parts of the world, but this phenomenon remained largely overlooked in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. To fill this knowledge gap, this study investigated land use changes from the 1970s to 2018 in the cities of Luxor and Cairo in Egypt and of Aqaba and Amman in Jordan using different Landsat datasets. Land cover classifications were performed with Maximum Likelihood Algorithm and Spectral Angle Mapper. In all four cities peri-urban green areas shrunk or shifted due to increased expansion of built-up areas. The largest reduction of peri-urban green areas were observed for Amman and Luxor, which decreased by 122.4 km² and 17.2 km², respectively, over the study period. For Cairo, an increase of peri-urban green area by 29 km² was detected, but its location shifted over the last five decades due to urban expansion. Green areas (urban and peri-urban) on a per-capita basis were 4.6, 12, 91, and 142 m 2 /capita for Aqaba, Cairo, Amman, and Luxor, respectively, in 2018. Land cover changes reflected critical political events like the so-called "Arab Spring", international treaties, recent migration waves and population growth. Rapid increases in urban built-up area put pressure on scarce land and water resources in the peri-urban fringes, thereby potentially leading to environmental stress. Effective city planning is needed to address the multiple challenges and competing interests of urban and peri-urban environments.

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