الفهرس 
REVIEW OF LITERATUREOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Egyptian agricultural lands occupy about 4% of the total area of the country. The population increase necessitates for better utilization of the current cultivated land resources in order to meet the need, and feed the people, since the rate of overpopulation increases annually by more than 2.1%, which is considered to be one of the sustainable development obstacles (Oskouei, 1997).
Convenient management to balance the human demands of foods with agricultural production is seriously needed at less favorable conditions. Land Evaluation (LE) optimizes the land use planning at the agronomical extensions through land productivity (LP) and land suitability (LS) assessment. It deals with two major aspects: physical resources such as soil and climate, and socio-economic resources like availability of manpower and market position, which affect the choice of the different alternatives for the most beneficial land use, Rossiter (1990 and 1995).
Advanced technologies such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Database Management Systems (DBMS), are now widely available for data input, analysis, simulation, and dissemination, which will help the planners and decision makers in organizing the information, understanding their spatial distribution, and hence providing a powerful tools for analyzing and synthesizing information.
Soils of the Banger El sokar area suffer from physical, chemical, and fertility implications, so, a proper land evaluation is needed to be carried out. For this reason, this area is taken as a model for study to survey and identify the soil types and attributes; build a geo-referenced database in GIS environment; and apply land suitability evaluation to formulate the best agricultural land use.
The current study is aimed at:
1. Characterize the main soil units.
2. Building up a digital georeferenced database for the study area.
3. Depthwise distribution of some available macro and micronutrients in the studied soil profiles.
4. Evaluating soil suitability for agricultural uses, represented by different crops.
5. Coupling land evaluation program using ALES-Arid with Geographic Information System (GIS) for visualization purposes.