These Copernicus Sentinel-2 images show agricultural development in the desert of southern Egypt, close to the border with Sudan.
Egypt is over 95% desert, making a very small proportion of its land suitable for agriculture. As the demand for food grows, the need for agricultural development in desert areas has intensified. This comparison highlights an important land reclamation project, where Egypt’s Western Desert is being used for agriculture, and how it has developed between 2015 (left image) and 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 therefore useful in agricultural monitoring for mapping and classifying land use, crop type, crop health, change detection, irrigated landscape mapping and crop area mapping.
Changes over the past 10 years are clearly visible in the images. In 2015, the barren landscape of south Egypt looked like any other desert. But over time, land cultivation has increased, transforming the area into viable agricultural land by 2025.
The shapes of the fields indicate the irrigation method used. Most of the cropland is divided into circles, up to 800 m wide. This is due to the central-pivot irrigation system, with water supplied by a set of sprinklers rotating around a well at the centre. Since no crops can grow in this climate without intensive irrigation, the fields are perfectly round. This type of irrigation helps farmers manage their watering demands and conserve precious resources.
Canals can be seen as thin, black lines cutting through the agricultural fields and supplying water from Lake Nasser, visible in black on the bottom right. One of the largest artificial reservoirs in the world, Lake Nasser is the result of the construction of a dam across the waters of the Nile to provide irrigation in the nearby areas.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the diversion of water from Lake Nasser created the Toshka Lakes featured in the top left corner. These endorheic lakes are filled by overflow from Lake Nasser through a manmade canal, clearly visible in the 2015 image snaking its way into the Sahara Desert.
The comparison also reveals extreme variations in the lakes over time. The rise and fall depend on fluctuations in water flow from the Nile. Between 2012 and 2018, the lakes had shrunk significantly, leaving only small remnants of water in the basins, as visible in 2015. Summer rainfall in Sudan in 2019 and record-breaking floods in 2020 rapidly replenished the lakes, which appear fully filled in 2025.
Copernicus Sentinel-2 plays a key role in mapping differences in land cover to understand how it is used over time. While providing detailed information about Earth’s vegetation, the mission also measures water quality and detects changes in water bodies, supporting sustainable water management – a valuable tool for arid areas where water is scarce.