الفهرس 
Assessment of Land Resources for Sustainable Coastal Integrated Planning in Al-Alamain – Ras El-Hekma AreaOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The continuous increase of human pressure on the Egyptian limited natural resources, with its virtually 96.4% of its territory an uninhabited part. The Nile valley and the delta area represent less than 3.6% of Egyptian land, where 70 million people inhabit this area. The expectation indicates that the size of Egyptian population will duplicate in the next 25 years. The overall growth of population and rural-urban migration flow in Egypt has resulted in a tremendous growth of the main cities. The activities expansion outside the old valley is one of the main objects of the Egyptian national plan. A great attention is directed to the North western coast of Egypt, due to its diverse characteristics. Socioeconomic development of the population in the costal rural areas leads to changes in use of the land resources and development of new activities. These changes create a conflict for the managers of the territory who have to choose between the “natural use” and the perceived objectives or needs of the stakeholders, investors, governmental plans, economists, town planners, environmentalists, and so on. For it to be useful, all planning must envisage conflicts and opportunities of use and act as a regulating mechanism of the area’s system, capable of anticipating changes. Therefore, studies on management of natural resources in such regions are considered of vital importance.
However, the study area covers an area of approximately 2230 sq. km, it extends within longitudes 28°54’9.68”E to 27°29’51.47”E and from latitudes 30°52’44.48”N to 31° 2’7.08”N. The study area is stretched along 3 districts: Al-Alamien, Dabaa and Marsa Matrouh, with the Mediterranean Sea is the northern border while El-Gaish road is the southern border. The International Coastal Highway divides the area into two divisions, the first division is the northward of the highway where the main land use is for tourism and recreational use, while the second division southward of the highway to El-Gaish road where the main land uses are urban settlements, agriculture and grazing.
The method that have been used is based on a system approach that is to say, on a hierarchical concept of the study area, integrating the subsystems of the system of interest (physical, socioeconomic, legal and institutional(, forming a part of a more amplified system. It is necessary to characterize and understand the dynamics, the flows, and their internal and external relationships; the methodology consists of series of steps that develop sequentially for clarity of presentation; it is a cyclic process of continual feedback that leads us to a decision. Each one of the phase has concrete objectives, but all together, the aim to gather the information, plot it spatially and submit it to statistical processing to be used in the overall land use allocation in order to resolve problems of the study area selected. The first step in the methodology is the inventory. The inventory consists of the collection and study of the information necessary to identify and describe the systems and subsystems, allowing a selection of the elements and variables to understand the system structure and function within the overall objectives of the study. Although a systems approach assumes an integration of data and method, in the inventory phases we will examine separately the subsystems of the system of interest and lastly analyze the interactions between the distinct subsystems.