English abstract
Urbanization is undoubtedly one of the global environmental challenges, shrinking
the vast green spaces and turning them into arid areas filled with man-made structures.
No wonder, therefore, that urbanization and its human activities are one of the main
causes of desertification. The random and unplanned distribution of lands and the
spread of urbanization in wadis without previous preparations make urbanization an
issue that must be studied. A portion of Salalah was identified as the study area on
which the analyses were made, this area of interest for the urbanized area is around 160
km², and it covers some human activities in this region that negatively affect the
environment; therefore, in this research, we shed light on the spread of camps in Salalah
plain in khareef season. In this study, remote sensing was used to detect the extent of
urbanization in this region through the available satellite images and aerial photos.
Multi-temporal historical aerial photos and satellite images starting from the 1960s until
2018 at a similar time of the year were helpful in detecting and mapping the changes in
urbanization and camps using several processes. The data also included recorded
historical rainfall and population data that will determine the causes behind the
shrinking of agricultural lands. After all the processes in this research, one of the main
findings of the digitizing process has shown that the built-up area has increased from
0.43 km² in 1968 to 6.93 km² (increased by 1,512 %) in 2018, while the agricultural
lands have decreased from 22.39 km² in 1994 to 18.86 km² (decreased by 16 %) in
2018. Moreover, the change detection results based on the unsupervised classification
of the satellite images between 1994 and 2018 show that the built-up area has increased
by 10.08%; on the other hand, the agricultural lands decreased by 12.02%. Therefore,
the estimated built-up area based on a simple extrapolation could increase to 5.11% by
2030. Regarding the camps spread, a major increase in the area of camps has been
observed, going from 0.27 km² in 2005 to 1.33 km² in 2018 with increase of 393%.
Through this study, the rainfall data analysis shows that there is no statistically
significant relationship between the shrinking of agricultural lands and the amount of
rainfall in the period 1980-2018. It was also clear that the continuous increase in
population in the period 2000-2017 has contributed to the increase of urbanization
