This research sought to assess historically the urban expansion of Agadir city in Morocco within the 35-year timespan (1984-2019), and the influence of those changes on the regulating services of Agadir. It was achieved by applying support vector machine supervised (SVM) algorithm on each Landsat products to derive land use/ land cover (LULC) maps. High accuracy assessment values were obtained for all Landsat classified maps. Spectral radiance model was exploited successfully to highlight the spatiotemporal changes of thermal behavior of city surfaces. Terrestrial carbon dynamics of Agadir LULC was evaluated by applying a process-based carbon model. The outcomes of this paper revealed an important urban expansion within the 35-year timespan with an important loss of vegetation and bare land. This urban evolution impacts the land surface temperature (LST) and caused carbon storage loss that contributes to local climate change. These findings could assist policy-makers to characterize a sustainable evolution of urban area, especially, to interpret how and where LULC changes might alter the dynamics of climate regulation and ecosystem services.
This study attempts to describe the physical characteristics of the Issen basin (western High Atlas of Morocco) in order to highlight the factors affecting water flow and volume that may increase water erosion risk. By using ALOS-DEM of moderate spatial resolution (12.5 m) and GIS platform, it was possible to provide a joint set of morphometric indices of the study area. The obtained results reveal that the relief of the study basin is of mountainous symptom indicating its maturity. The contrasting topography (625 m to 3528 m), with a specific unevenness of the order of 612 m, highlights a strong relief. 94% of the watershed area has a slope of over 3%. The mean elongation of the basin is 1.74, with a fairly long water concentration time of about 7.5 hours and an average drainage density of 0.85 km-1. The tectonics, lithology, and external geodynamics characterstics indicate a strongly contrasted morphology characterizing the Issen basin. Overall, these morphometric characteristics can increase the shallow water flows and sediments mobilized by the Issen Wadi, which can increase the soil loss and flooding risks in the basin.
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