Remote Sensing Data Analysis

**81**

**Chapter 5**

**Abstract**

**1. Introduction**

in the wealthy Gulf States [3, 4].

Modeling the Environment

with Remote Sensing and GIS:

Locations of the United Arab

Emirates (UAE)

*Salem Issa and Nazmi Saleous*

problems using case studies from United Arab Emirates.

**Keywords:** environment, remote sensing, GIS, modeling, urban growth

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

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

Applied Case Studies from Diverse

Maintaining a healthy and sustainable environment is of paramount importance for human well-being and economic activity. Hence, environment protection, requiring continuous and reliable monitoring, has become a major mandate at various levels of government. There is a direct link between the availability of information about environmentally endangered areas and sound decision-making for effective and sustainable management. While remote sensing allows acquiring relevant information on a regular and repetitive basis even in areas where accessibility is limited, geographic information systems (GIS) provide unique tools for storing, processing, and integrating this information with other sources enabling the development of spatial models that help identify and characterize environmentally endangered areas. In this chapter, we will discuss how GIS-based modeling is applied for solving diverse environmental
