International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—Coastal zones represent vital international issues for environmental and sustainable development. Most coastal developing countries mainly depend on the limited coastal resources for their economic development. The promising region of the Northwestern coast of Egypt has attracted massive investments. The main objectives of this present research are: selection of most suitable sites for constructing ports in this area based on a number of environmental criteria and to assess the suitability of the proposed site. Factors used in this study include natural land/marine hazards/factors man-made facilities. Materials used include: multispectral satellite images, digital elevation models, topographic maps, Admiral marine maps, in addition to field survey of the sea depth. Spatial modeling is performed using the spatial analyst module for port site selection and assessment. A total of 62 locations are identified and classified as suitable for positioning a port. All identified areas extend from west of Marsa Matrouh to East of Negeila and record a suitability values from (Good) to unsuitable.

Index Terms—Site selection, ports, northwestern coast of Egypt, remote sensing and GIS, land criteria, offshore/inshore criteria.

Salwa F. Elbeih and Wael Attia are with Engineering Applications Department, National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, Egypt (e-mail: saelbeih@narss.sci.eg, saelbeih@gmail.com, wael.gis@gmail.com).
Sameh B. Elkafrawy is with Marine Sciences Department, National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, Egypt (e-mail: s_elkafrawy@yahoo.com; sameh@narss.sci.eg).

[PDF]

Cite: Salwa F. Elbeih, Sameh B. Elkafrawy, and Wael Attia, "Multi-criteria Site Selection and Assessment of Ports in the Northwestern Coast of Egypt: A Remote Sensing and GIS Approach," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 10, no. 10, pp. 310-320, 2019.

Copyright © 2019 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).