27 Egypt. J. Soil Sci. 52, No. 3, pp. 427-444 (2012) a.afifinrc@gmail.com U A Combined Use of Remote Sensing and GIS for the Assessment of Agricultural Land Dwindling and its Impact in Wheat Cultivation Ahmed A. Afifi * and Kh. M. Darwish ** * Soils and Water Use Department, National Research Centre (NRC), Giza and ** Soils and Water Technology Department, Arid Land Research Institute, City for Scientific Research and Technology Applications, Borg El-Arab, Alexandria, Egypt. RBAN sprawl is one of the main problems that threaten the .......limited highly fertile land of Egypt. In this research, satellite images of Landsat TM 1992, ETM+ 1999 and SPOT, 2006 has been used to study the urban sprawl and its impact on agricultural land in Al-Fayoum Governorate. Maximum likelihood supervised classification and post-classification change detection techniques were applied for monitoring the urban sprawl in the study area. Ground truth collected during several field trips conducted in 2009 and topographic map of 1992 were used to assess the accuracy of the classification results. Using ancillary data, visual interpretation and expert knowledge of the area through GIS further refined the classification results. Post- classification change detection technique was used to produce change image through cross-tabulation. Combining the soil and land capability maps, in one hand, and the urban thematic layers, in other hand, using GIS, made it possible to point out the risk of urban expansion at the expense of the highly capability class. During the (1992 – 2006) period, the high capable soils (Class I) decreased from 761 to 701 Km 2 . The moderate capable soils decreased from 141 to 133 Km 2 , while the marginally capable soils decreased from 513 Km 2 to 480 Km 2 during the same period. These data were used to build the mathematical model to predict the agricultural land dwindling till 2040 and used these data to calculate the total loss of land used for wheat cultivation. According to the model the total loss due to urban sprawl reach to 53972429.5 Egyptian Pounds. Keywords: SPOT, Change detection, Urbanization, Land cover, GIS, Soil map, Wheat. The conflict between urban and agricultural land use, however, is now becoming a subject of controversy. The transformation of productive agricultural land to urban use under burgeoning populations has become a contentious element in debates over sustainable development and food security (Ehrlich, 1989, Daily and Ehrlich, 1992 and Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 1992). As more land is converted to urban uses, the question arises as to whether this trend represents a systematic