Proposed spatial framework to develop land use in an environmentally- sensitive area: Case study, El-Daba'a region, Egypt Part I: Ecological value assessment using GIS

The aim of this study is to assess the ecological characteristics of El-Daba'a area in Egypt using GIS as a first step for the development of an environmental management plan for the area. The Absence of environmental planning in the process of land use development may cause many significant negative impacts on biodiversity, ecological value, and the general environmental conditions, and therefore, reducing such negative impacts will improve land use development. The first part of this sequel of two papers, which is part of a sustainable land use development research program, aims at designing a spatial framework to improve land use planning and development in an environmental context. The research program deals with the problem of land use planning and development in an arid coastal area under environmentally sensitive conditions. The study area is El-Daba'a region, located in the northwestern coast of Egypt, which can be described as a wild area. The approach used in this paper consists of studying the spatial ecological characteristics of El-Daba'a region using different spatial data including maps and Landsat remote sensing data. These data are used to create a series of superimposed informative layers managed by a geographic information system (GIS) to describe the spatial ecological characteristics of the study area. The developed GIS allows decision makers to handle large amounts of information simultaneously such as geology, geomorphology, land cover, wild life and many other different information layers. The system is designed to help decision makers to organize, relate, analyze, and visualize the ecological data and information in the study area. The developed GIS system might be used to determine the probable effects of building a nuclear power station on the ecosystem.