Monitoring the spatiotemporal dynamics of summer-irrigated agriculture under conflict and drought: The Middle Orontes Basin, Syria (1995–2025)

In semi-arid regions like the Orontes River Basin in Syria, summer-irrigated agriculture is critical for food security but remains highly sensitive to environmental and sociopolitical fluctuations. This study monitors the spatiotemporal changes in the summer-irrigated agricultural extent across four distinct geographic sectors within the conflict-affected Middle Orontes Basin (1995–2025). To overcome data scarcity and ensure inter-sensor comparability, radiometrically harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery were processed in Google Earth Engine (GEE), utilizing 90th percentile seasonal composites to generate binary Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) masks. A targeted change detection framework was subsequently applied to these exported masks in ArcGIS Pro. Concurrently, a parallel cloud-based analysis was performed to evaluate land-surface conditions by extracting annual summer spatial means for NDVI, Land Surface Temperature (LST), and the Vegetation Health Index (VHI), with the latter normalized using 5th and 95th historical percentiles to mitigate outlier distortion. To contextualize potential drivers, hydrological-year CHIRPS precipitation anomalies and VIIRS night-time lights (NTL) were integrated as indirect proxies for meteorological stress and settlement infrastructure viability, respectively. Results reveal substantial inter-annual volatility. The summer-irrigated agricultural extent reached 644 km ² in 2005 (the maximum among the analyzed observation years), prior to severe late-2000s droughts. During the conflict period, the extent declined to 251 km ² in 2016 (the minimum among the analyzed observation years), a contraction temporally consistent with widespread conflict-related disruption and compounded by persistent vegetation degradation. A spatially uneven recovery culminated in a post-conflict peak of 498 km ² in 2024, followed by a marked contraction to 288 km ² in 2025 due to combined hydroclimatic and socioeconomic constraints. Long-term spatial analysis indicates a redistribution of cultivation toward upstream southern areas, while downstream northern sectors experienced persistent irrigated area loss. These findings demonstrate the operational value of the proposed framework for evaluating the spatial persistence of summer-irrigated agriculture in conflict zones, highlighting that water scarcity and infrastructure access act jointly to constrain regional stability.