**1. Introduction**

Although deserts or arid lands typically do not have a large number of inhabitants, they are often the loci of economic and cultural activity. For example, the oil-producing nations of the Middle East are all found within a single arid region. Furthermore, deserts tend to be fragile ecosystems, requiring little in the way of perturbations in order to cause tremendous changes in the landscape [1, 2]. The size, remoteness, and harsh nature of many of the world's deserts make it difficult and expensive to map or monitor these landscapes or to aid planning for and management of renewable natural resources. The situation exacerbates in developing countries where lack of accurate maps and the need for rapid and relatively accurate mapping techniques are urgent; this is becoming challenging if we know the dimension of large-scale engineering projects being implemented, particularly in the wealthy Gulf States [3, 4].

Remote sensing and GIS are promising new-time and cost-effective techniques to image remote arid and hyperarid lands. With the use of ancillary field data and

the calibration of remote sensing inputs, data integration within a GIS can enhance the extraction of information from satellite imagery and has led to a synergistic approach in spatial data handling and modeling [5–7], hence improving the accuracy of a variety of outputs [8, 9].

In this chapter, we will expose the power and benefit of integrating remote sensing and geographic information systems to model our environment through various case studies applied to the arid/hyper arid environment of the United Arab Emirates. Four case studies are introduced and discussed in Section 3 namely:

