TY - JOUR A1 - Meister, Julia A1 - Garbe, Philipp A1 - Trappe, Julian A1 - Ullmann, Tobias A1 - Es-Senussi, Ashraf A1 - Baumhauer, Roland A1 - Lange-Athinodorou, Eva A1 - El-Raouf, Amr Abd T1 - The Sacred Waterscape of the Temple of Bastet at Ancient Bubastis, Nile Delta (Egypt) JF - Geosciences N2 - Sacred water canals or lakes, which provided water for all kinds of purification rites and other activities, were very specific and important features of temples in ancient Egypt. In addition to the longer-known textual record, preliminary geoarchaeological surveys have recently provided evidence of a sacred canal at the Temple of Bastet at Bubastis. In order to further explore the location, shape, and course of this canal and to find evidence of the existence of a second waterway, also described by Herodotus, 34 drillings and five 2D geoelectrical measurements were carried out in 2019 and 2020 near the temple. The drillings and 2D ERT surveying revealed loamy to clayey deposits with a thickness of up to five meters, most likely deposited in a very low energy fluvial system (i.e., a canal), allowing the reconstruction of two separate sacred canals both north and south of the Temple of Bastet. In addition to the course of the canals, the width of about 30 m fits Herodotus’ description of the sacred waterways. The presence of numerous artefacts proved the anthropogenic use of the ancient canals, which were presumably connected to the Nile via a tributary or canal located west or northwest of Bubastis. KW - ancient Egypt KW - Tell Basta KW - sacred lakes KW - Herodotus KW - ERT KW - drilling KW - Isheru Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-246129 SN - 2076-3263 VL - 11 IS - 9 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stanley, Jean-Daniel A1 - Ullmann, Tobias A1 - Lange-Athinodorou, Eva T1 - Holocene aridity-induced interruptions of human activity along a fluvial channel in Egypt's northern delta JF - Quaternary N2 - Geoarchaeological information presented here pertains to a subsidiary Nile channel that once flowed west of the main Sebennitic distributary and discharged its water and sediments at Egypt’s then north-central deltaic coast. Periodical paleoclimatic episodes during the later Middle and Upper Holocene included decreased rainfall and increased aridity that reduced the Nile’s flow levels and thus likely disrupted nautical transport and anthropogenic activity along this channel. Such changes in this deltaic sector, positioned adjacent to the Levantine Basin in the Eastern Mediterranean, can be attributed to climatic shifts triggered as far as the North Atlantic to the west, and African highland source areas of the Egyptian Nile to the south. Of special interest in a study core recovered along the channel are several sediment sequences without anthropogenic material that are interbedded between strata comprising numerous potsherds. The former are interpreted here as markers of increased regional aridity and reduced Nile flow which could have periodically disrupted the regional distribution of goods and nautical activities. Such times occurred ~5000 years B.P., ~4200–4000 years B.P., ~3200–2800 years B.P., ~2300–2200 years B.P., and more recently. Periods comparable to these are also identified by altered proportions of pollen, isotopic and compositional components in different radiocarbon-dated Holocene cores recovered elsewhere in the Nile delta, the Levantine region to the east and north of Egypt, and in the Faiyum depression south of the delta. KW - Nile delta KW - Sebennitic KW - paleoenvironment KW - paleoclimate KW - Nile flow KW - geoarchaeology Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-250285 SN - 2571-550X VL - 4 IS - 4 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fekri, Erfan A1 - Latifi, Hooman A1 - Amani, Meisam A1 - Zobeidinezhad, Abdolkarim T1 - A training sample migration method for wetland mapping and monitoring using Sentinel data in Google Earth Engine JF - Remote Sensing N2 - Wetlands are one of the most important ecosystems due to their critical services to both humans and the environment. Therefore, wetland mapping and monitoring are essential for their conservation. In this regard, remote sensing offers efficient solutions due to the availability of cost-efficient archived images over different spatial scales. However, a lack of sufficient consistent training samples at different times is a significant limitation of multi-temporal wetland monitoring. In this study, a new training sample migration method was developed to identify unchanged training samples to be used in wetland classification and change analyses over the International Shadegan Wetland (ISW) areas of southwestern Iran. To this end, we first produced the wetland map of a reference year (2020), for which we had training samples, by combining Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 images and the Random Forest (RF) classifier in Google Earth Engine (GEE). The Overall Accuracy (OA) and Kappa coefficient (KC) of this reference map were 97.93% and 0.97, respectively. Then, an automatic change detection method was developed to migrate unchanged training samples from the reference year to the target years of 2018, 2019, and 2021. Within the proposed method, three indices of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), and the mean Standard Deviation (SD) of the spectral bands, along with two similarity measures of the Euclidean Distance (ED) and Spectral Angle Distance (SAD), were computed for each pair of reference–target years. The optimum threshold for unchanged samples was also derived using a histogram thresholding approach, which led to selecting the samples that were most likely unchanged based on the highest OA and KC for classifying the test dataset. The proposed migration sample method resulted in high OAs of 95.89%, 96.83%, and 97.06% and KCs of 0.95, 0.96, and 0.96 for the target years of 2018, 2019, and 2021, respectively. Finally, the migrated samples were used to generate the wetland map for the target years. Overall, our proposed method showed high potential for wetland mapping and monitoring when no training samples existed for a target year. KW - wetland KW - Google Earth Engine (GEE) KW - training sample migration KW - sentinel Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-248542 SN - 2072-4292 VL - 13 IS - 20 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Landmann, Tobias A1 - Schramm, Matthias A1 - Colditz, Rene R. A1 - Dietz, Andreas A1 - Dech, Stefan T1 - Wide Area Wetland Mapping in Semi-Arid Africa Using 250-Meter MODIS Metrics and Topographic Variables N2 - Wetlands in West Africa are among the most vulnerable ecosystems to climate change. West African wetlands are often freshwater transfer mechanisms from wetter climate regions to dryer areas, providing an array of ecosystem services and functions. Often wetland-specific data in Africa is only available on a per country basis or as point data. Since wetlands are challenging to map, their accuracies are not well considered in global land cover products. In this paper we describe a methodology to map wetlands using well-corrected 250-meter MODIS time-series data for the year 2002 and over a 360,000 km2 large study area in western Burkina Faso and southern Mali (West Africa). A MODIS-based spectral index table is used to map basic wetland morphology classes. The index uses the wet season near infrared (NIR) metrics as a surrogate for flooding, as a function of the dry season chlorophyll activity metrics (as NDVI). Topographic features such as sinks and streamline areas were used to mask areas where wetlands can potentially occur, and minimize spectral confusion. 30-m Landsat trajectories from the same year, over two reference sites, were used for accuracy assessment, which considered the area-proportion of each class mapped in Landsat for every MODIS cell. We were able to map a total of five wetland categories. Aerial extend of all mapped wetlands (class “Wetland”) is 9,350 km2, corresponding to 4.3% of the total study area size. The classes “No wetland”/“Wetland” could be separated with very high certainty; the overall agreement (KHAT) was 84.2% (0.67) and 97.9% (0.59) for the two reference sites, respectively. The methodology described herein can be employed to render wide area base line information on wetland distributions in semi-arid West Africa, as a data-scarce region. The results can provide (spatially) interoperable information feeds for inter-zonal as well as local scale water assessments. KW - Geologie KW - wetland mapping KW - MODIS time-series KW - Landsat KW - land cover KW - class homogeneity KW - West Africa Y1 - 2010 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-68628 ER -