The refugee movement creates urban and environmental pressures at their destination locations. This pressure often presents in the form of Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) change. This study seeks to understand the impact of the Syrian refugees’ influence on changing the urban and agricultural land dynamics in Irbid district in northwestern Jordan from 1985 to 2021, including the period of the civil war in Syria, using Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images for the years 1985 and 2004, and the Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) for the years 2013 and 2021. The Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform was used to conduct all image processing and perform calculations and classification analysis using the Random Forest (RF) approach. The study of the classified images compared LULC before and during the Syrian crisis using images from 1985, 2004, 2013, and 2021. The results show that the urban area increased. In parallel, agricultural land increased. During the Syrian refugee crisis, agriculture became a significant livelihood activity for Syrian refugees. In summary, the movement of the refugees to Irbid district caused an increased demand for land and housing, which accelerated the building and construction process.

In this study, we implemented a remote sensing-based approach for monitoring abandoned agricultural land in the Yarmouk River Basin (YRB) in Southern Syria and Northern Jordan during the Syrian crisis. A time series analysis for the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI) was conducted using 1650 multi-temporal images from Landsat-5 and Landsat-8 between 1986 and 2021. We analyzed the agricultural phenological profiles and investigated the impact of the Syrian crisis on agricultural activities in YRB. The analysis was performed using JavaScript commands in Google Earth Engine. The results confirmed the impact of the Syrian crisis on agricultural land use. The phenological characteristics of NDVI and NDMI during the crisis (2013–2021) were compared to the phenological profiles for the period before the crisis (1986–2010). The NDVI and NDMI profiles had smooth, bell-shaped, and single beak NDVI and NDMI values during the period of crisis in comparison to those irregular phenological profiles for the period before the crisis or during the de-escalation/reconciliation period in the study area. The maximum average NDVI and NDMI values was found in March during the crisis, indicating the progress of natural vegetation and fallow land, while they fluctuated between March and April before the crisis or during the de-escalation/reconciliation period, indicating regular agricultural and cultivation practices.

The present study aims to use systematic conservation planning to analyse and review the national protected areas (PAs) network in Jordan. The analysis included the application of three modules: the environmental risk surface (ERS), the relative biodiversity index (RBI), and the application of Marxan. The methodology was based on using Marxan to achieve solutions for three scenarios for the PAs network. Marxan was applied to the input data, which included vegetation types, distribution of threatened mammals and plants, locations of currently established PAs and other types of designations. The first two scenarios aimed to conserve 4% and 17%, respectively, of each vegetation type, and 10% and 20%, respectively, of the extent of occurrence of threatened mammals and plants. The third scenario aimed to conserve 17% of each vegetation type and 10% of the extent of occurrence of threatened plants and mammals, except for forest and the Hammada vegetation which had the target of 30% and 4%, respectively. The results of the three scenarios indicated that the boundaries of existing reserves should be extended to achieve the conservation targets. Some currently proposed (PAs), such as the Aqaba Mountains, did not appear in any of the solutions for the three scenarios indicating that the inclusion of these sites in the proposed (PAs) network should be reconsidered. All three scenarios highlighted the importance of having conservation areas between the western and eastern parts of the country. Systematic conservation planning is a structured, replicable, transparent, and defensible method for designing PA networks. It allows for finding efficient solutions building on what is currently conserved and minimizing the fragmentation and cost of the proposed solution for conservation areas.