Cropland in the desert

These Copernicus Sentinel-2 images show agricultural development in the desert of southern Egypt, close to the border with Sudan.

The series highlights an important land reclamation project, where Egypt’s Western Desert is being used for agriculture, and how it has developed between 2015 and 2025. Changes over time are clearly visible. In 2015, the barren landscape of south Egypt looked like any other desert. But in 10 years, land cultivation has increased, transforming the area into viable agricultural land by 2025.

These false-colour images have been processed using Sentinel-2’s near-infrared channel to display vegetation in red – a particularly stark contrast to the desert areas across the region. The resulting range of colours, from red to brown, is a more accurate representation of different types of crop or different growth stages, compared to true-colour images.

Such satellite data are useful in agricultural monitoring for mapping and classifying land use, crop type, crop health, change detection, irrigated landscape mapping and crop area mapping.

See also: Earth from Space: Desert cropland