الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
One of the major land reclamation projects in Egypt is going on along El-Salam Canal in Sinai. A part of its western portion in El-Tina Plain was implemented and land was handed over to the holders who started to plant it. However, they failed to grow cereals and some other profitable crops in most of the area due to the high soil salinity and therefore, the land use were shifted to fish farming or left barren. The current study aims at establishing a spatial decision support system to design suitable landuse types that ensure the sustainability of the natural resources of the area under investigation through appropriate management policy. The study area is located at the northwestern part of Sinai Peninsula between longitudes 32º 18’ 50”and 32º 31’ 40” east, latitudes 31º 00’ 00” and 31º 10’ 00” north. The northern parts of the study area are closed to Mediterranean Sea. The area is limited by Baloza drain to the south, Suez Canal to the west and by Baloza- El-Sahel road to the east. The investigated area occupies about 222.92 km2 (53065 feddans). The study area was classified into four landform unites. They are dry and wet sabkhas, swamps and water bodies, which occupy 44, 18, 35, 3% of the entire area, respectively. The soils were then classified into two main soil orders; Aridsols and Entisols. The areal distribution of the soil subgroups showed that the Sodic Haplogypsids, Typic Haplosalids, Typic Aquisalids and Typic Torripsamments subgroups cover about 2.5, 45, 26 and 23.5 of the total area under investigation, respectively. Interpretation of Landsat satellite imageries for the landuse of the years 1989, 1998, 2003 and 2013 showed that the barren land was decreased with time from 96.56% in 1989 to 30.05% in 2013. The fish ponds area increased from 15.73% in 2003 to 23.82% in 2013. The cultivated land was however amounted only to 7.5% in 2013. These data are definitely expressing the limitations of the land for the agricultural use under the present soil conditions. A SDSS for landuse management approach was proposed to be established based on ArcGIS database. It contains morphological description and analytical data of the studied soils in tabular format and meteorological data, base map of the study area, the interpreted land use / land cover maps in raster format. The land capability and land suitability models were applied and resulted in actual and potential land capability and land suitability maps. The proposed SDSS landuse types for the study area are arable land that needs good management practices that are amounted to 51.2%, arable land after reclamation represent 9.2%, permanent fish ponds are accounted for 11.2% and the area that could be left to residential, industrial and other uses was amounted to 28.4% of the entire area. In comparison, the landuse types were distributed as 8% cultivated area, 19% rotational fish ponds and 73% included barren, salt marshes and water bodies in 2013. Based on the SDSS approach, the arable land would be increased to 71% of the study area where almost 60% may be devoted to field crops cultivation and 11% can be used as permanent fish farms.