Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Institute of African Research and Studies - Department of Natural Resources

Selection of suitable crops and water management are considered the main pillars of sustainable agriculture in arid and semi-arid land. The main objective is to use remote sensing and GIS for setting a suitable cropping pattern and calculating water requirements based on the conventional methods and estimating seasonal actual evapotranspiration using mapping evapoTranspiration at high resolution with Internalized calibration (METRIC) model. Daqalt command area located in north Delta, Egypt was selected for running this work. ALESarid was proposed for applying land suitability assessment, interactive microsoft excel was also proposed for creating single crop coefficient, accumulated crop evapotranspiration and water requirements for recommended suitable crops. ETMapper is a promising operational tool written in python language for estimating instantaneous, daily, monthly, seasonally and annually actual evapotranspiration on the basis of surface energy balance using landsat-8 data. Results indicated that suitable crop pattern and calculating crop water requirements based on alfalfa reference evapotranspiration were more suitable for water management. Estimating actual evapotranspiration using remotely sensed data which offered an accurate estimation of water requirements

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