Chapter 27 Monitoring of Agricultural Expansion Using Hybrid Classification Method in Southwestern Fringes of Wadi El-Natrun, Egypt: An Appraisal for Sustainable Development Ahmed M. Saqr, Mahmoud Nasr, Manabu Fujii, Chihiro Yoshimura, and Mona G. Ibrahim Abstract Agricultural development activities are essential for sustainable develop- ment in arid and semiarid regions. Therefore, a hybrid image classification method- ology was proposed to monitor agricultural expansion and identify its linkages to sustainable development goals (SDGs). It was applied in the southwestern fringes of Wadi El-Natrun, Egypt, which is considered a promising area for reclamation projects via groundwater. Based on the inspection of the existing land cover (LC) types, spectral indices, i.e., normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), bare soil index (BSI), and dry built-up index (DBI), were used to get training samples for the obtained Landsat images. Then, the maximum likelihood algorithm followed by a change detection procedure was applied to delineate LC trends between 2007 and 2022. The resulting LC maps exhibited high accuracy, with a Kappa coefficient equal to ~0.90. In addition, the agricultural regions grew from nearly 7.64% of the whole area to about 43.72%, accompanied by a severe shortage in the desert land of roughly 36.30%. However, the urban areas witnessed a small gain of approximately A. M. Saqr · M. Nasr · M. G. Ibrahim Environmental Engineering Department, Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology, Alexandria, Egypt A. M. Saqr (B ) · M. Fujii · C. Yoshimura Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: ahmedsaqr@mans.edu.eg; ahmed.saqr@ejust.edu.eg A. M. Saqr Irrigation and Hydraulics Department, Faculty of Engineering, Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt M. Nasr Sanitary Engineering Department, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt M. G. Ibrahim Environmental Health Department, High Institute of Public Health, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. Ujikawa et al. (eds.), Environment and Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4101-8_27 349