Climate change and its impact on agriculture and water resources have become a global concern. The implications of extreme weather events on food production and water resource availability are starting to have social and economic effects worldwide. The present research aims at integrating the analysis of the atmospheric parameters with remote sensing, geographic information systems, and CROPWAT 8 model to evaluate the impacts of climate change on the irrigation water requirements estimates in a selected area in El-Beheira governorate, Egypt. Remote sensing and GIS are incorporated to produce land-use/land-cover maps and soil properties maps. On the other hand, the atmospheric parameters were analyzed using python analytical coding. The study utilized the Land-use/Land-cover (LU/LC) map produced from Sentinel-2 data. The agricultural area covered about 89% of the studied area and was occupied by seven crops. Wheat and berseem were the major crops in the area and covered about 67% of the studied area; therefore, their irrigation water requirements were calculated utilizing the CROPWAT 8 model. Furthermore, citrus irrigation water requirements were also included in this research, even though it only covered 10% of the studied area because it had the highest amount of irrigation water requirements. Forecasting the potential climate changes under the best-case scenario for the next thirty years revealed that the studied area will have no rain and a slight decrease in the average temperature. Accordingly, the irrigation water requirements will increase by almost 4% under current practices, and the increase will reach about 13% under no-field loss practices.

Soil salinity is the most important soil property that affects the agriculture productivity. Periodical monitoring of its status is considered a crucial factor in the selection of appropriate agricultural practices to attain a sustainable production. The availability of remote sensing data processed by a somewhat novel method such as artificial neural networks (ANN) offer a potential solution that could easily and affordably replace the in-site monitoring methods. The aim of this work is to use high spectral resolution Sentinel-2 (S2) data for soil salinity prediction utilizing neural networks. The study evaluated three approaches in processing the S2 data for inclusion in the artificial neural network for soil salinity prediction. These approaches included S2 spectral reflectance data, spectral indices and principal component analysis (PCA) of the S2 data. The results revealed that a combination of these approaches including the reflectance data of band 11(shortwave infrared band) of S2, the normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI) and the second PCA (dominated by the near infrared band) gave the best performance when used as input when designing the artificial neural networks to predict the soil salinity. The overall accuracy of this approach has a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.94 between the actual and predicted soil salinity.

Measuring the soil salinity using visible and near-infrared (vis–NIR) reflectance spectra is considered a fast and cost-effective method. For monitoring purposes, estimating soils with low salinity measured as electrical conductivity (EC) using vis–NIR spectra is still understudied. In this research, 399 legacy soil samples from six regions of Southern Xinjiang, China with low EC values were used. Reflectance spectra were measured in the laboratory on dried and ground soil samples using a portable vis–NIR spectrometer. By using 10-fold cross-validation, three algorithms–partial least-squares regression (PLSR), random forest (RF), and Cubist–were employed to develop statistical models of EC. The model performance evaluation was obtained by the relative importance of variants. In terms of accuracy assessment of soil EC prediction, the results demonstrated that the Cubist model performed better ($R^2$ = 0.67, RMSE = 0.16 mS/cm, RPIQ = 2.28) than both PLSR and RF. Despite similar variants for modelling, the RF model performed somewhat better than that of the PLSR. Additionally, the 610 nm and 790 nm wavelengths only demonstrated significant promise for predicting low soil EC values when used in the Cubist mode. The current research recommends the use of Cubist to estimate the low soil salinity using the vis–NIR reflectance spectra.

Soil spectroscopy offers a rapid, cost-effective alternative to traditional soil analyses for characterization and classification. Previous studies have mainly focused on predicting soil categories using single sensors, particularly visible–near-infrared (vis–NIR) or mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopy. In this study, we evaluated the performance of vis–NIR, MIR, and their combined spectra for soil classification by partial least-squares discriminant analysis (PLSDA) and random forest (RF). Utilizing 60 typical soil profiles’ data of four soil classes from the global soil spectral library (GSSL), our results demonstrated that in PLSDA models, direct combination (optimal overall accuracy: 70.6%, kappa coefficient: 0.60) and outer product analysis (OPA) fused spectra (optimal overall accuracy: 68.1%, kappa coefficient: 0.57) outperformed vis–NIR (optimal overall accuracy: 62.2%, kappa coefficient: 0.49) but underperformed compared to MIR (optimal overall accuracy: 71.4%, kappa coefficient: 0.62). In RF models, classification accuracy using fused spectra was inferior to single spectral ranges, with MIR achieving the highest classification accuracy (optimal overall accuracy: 89.1%, kappa coefficient: 0.85). Therefore, MIR alone remains the most effective spectral range for accurate soil class discrimination. Our findings highlight the potential of MIR spectroscopy for enhancing global soil classification accuracy and efficiency, with important implications for soil resource management and agricultural planning across diverse environments.

The presence of gaps or missing values in time series prevents the practical use of such data. The current research aims at developing a simplified, straightforward technique for gap-filling the time series data of the Normalize Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) generated using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). This research assumes that a relationship exists between the pixel location, date of acquisition and its NDVI value within a defined timeline. Therefore, two relatively simple methods were tested: the Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) analysis and the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN)to fill the NDVI missing values. While MLR is a well-known simple statistical method, the ANN has been successfully applied for the analysis of various scientific data, including the gap-filling of time series data. Nevertheless, ANN proved its supremacy in such approach. The accuracy of estimation utilizing the developed ANN model reached an average of r2 of 0.8, while the average accuracy of MLR was about 0.3. Nevertheless, the developed model could only be applied within the same timeframe of the images used for developing the model. Otherwise, the accuracy of determination was reduced significantly. The results showed that according to its performance, ANN are promising for filling missing data of NDVI time series and could be applied to any other vegetation indices as well.