article · Sustainability
Managing the impact of urban expansion on cultural heritage is critical for sustainable development and tourism. Research at Kom el Shoqafa in Egypt and Shush in Iran tracks urban sprawl near these archaeological sites using freely available satellite open data spanning from 1964 to 2016. By combining declassified Corona photography with multi-date Landsat imagery, standard classification methods were applied to evaluate land-use shifts over time. The results demonstrate that built-up areas expanded substantially around both locations. In contrast, agricultural land cover exhibited both increases and decreases over the monitored periods. The findings demonstrate that freely accessible, long-term satellite time series provide an effective, low-cost approach for environmental monitoring and change detection. Integrating remote sensing with geographic information systems offers practical capabilities for tracking local land transformations and devising strategies to preserve threatened archaeological landscapes.
Encroaching urbanisation poses a growing risk to cultural heritage and sustainable tourism. Using free, historical satellite data allows conservationists and planners to monitor landscape changes without heavy financial investment. This provides an accessible way to document urban growth patterns, assess spatial threats to ancient monuments, and support better evidence-based preservation planning at both local and regional scales.
The approach functions as a low-cost tool for environmental monitoring, change detection, and archaeological site preservation. Potential users include heritage protection authorities and land-use planners needing to observe urban and agricultural changes. Having been applied and tested on satellite time series across two historical sites, the methodology provides a practical workflow based on integrating remote sensing and geographic information systems, though specific commercialisation pathways are not detailed.
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Instrumental to the concept of sustainability must be the search for feasible ways to implement sustainability, especially connecting heritage and tourism. This should be understood in relationship with the persistence in time and the current and future conception of the human-made environment. This study deals with the spatial characterization over time of the urban sprawl close to and around two important archaeological areas: Kom el Shoqafa, Egypt and Shush, Iran. For both of the investigated sites, change detection analyses have been conducted using satellite declassified Corona and multidate Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery available for free from the USGS Earth Explorer. The study involves the collection of Corona 1964, Landsat TM 1984, Landsat ETM+ 1998 and L8 2016. The past and current urban and agricultural areas have been extracted by using consolidated classification techniques. Analyses and quantification of the spatial dimension of the urban expansion showed that, for both the study sites, urban areas have expanded to a significant percentage. In particular, the analysis of Corona and Landsat TM, ETM+, L8 imagery in Kom el Shoqafa revealed that, for the urban area, the evaluation of the change detection presented generally increasing chronology in both of the study areas, but for the agriculture lands, we can see that the changes sometimes decreased and sometimes increased. As a whole, outputs from our investigations clearly highlight that the current availability free of charge of long term satellite time series provides an excellent low cost tool for several applications including environmental monitoring and change detection to observe and quantify urban and land use changes from a global down to a local scale. We examine the capabilities of integrating remote sensing and GIS and suggest some innovative solutions to preserve the archaeological sites.
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DOI: 10.3390/su9040572
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