Remote Sensing Applications for Cultural Heritage Sites Sustainability: Case Studies from Egypt

Abstract

Egypt has a long history extended to the prehistory, Neolithic, pre-dynastic, Pharaonic, Greek and Roman, Coptic, and Islamic eras. Because of the climate changes, the land use/land cover changes, and the land-reclamation activities, the groundwater level under the reconstruction and the monuments walls became high and present big risk on these heritage sites. This study aims to show some studies applied on some archaeological sites in Egypt using Satellite data and GIS tools. In this study, Optical (Landsat, Quickbird, Orbview, Spot, and Sentinel2) have been analysed by RS and GIS software (ArcMap, Snap, and Envi) used to detect the geo-environmental problems around the archaeological in Egypt. In order to detect the land use/land cover changes close to the heritage sites, the spatial distribution analysing, spatial autocorrelation, Ripley’s K function, Hot Spot Analysis, Spatial Cluster Analysis (Ripleys K Function), and the supervised classification methods were applied. The results of this study proved that the urban sprawling close to the studied areas was enormous and caused big risk on the archaeological areas. Such studies can support the decision makers with the required information about the environmental status around the archaeological sites for keeping these sites in safe condition.