Satellite-guided salinity-aware land prioritization for date palm expansion in Al Ain region, UAE

Long-lived irrigated plantations require regional screening before site-level land and water appraisal. We developed a non-compensatory remote-sensing and GIS framework to prioritize further investigation for date-palm expansion in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. Annual 10-m land-cover maps, terrain, persistent surface-water occurrence, regional soil and geology, and salinity categories for 0–50 and 50–100 cm were combined through explicit class precedence. High and Moderate denote mapped limitation under an adequate-irrigation assumption. The executed Base candidate area was approximately 731,449 ha (54.13% of the analytical footprint); treating unresolved salinity coverage as Not assessed reduced it to approximately 730,457 ha (54.06%). Water supply, irrigation-water quality, and allocation remain unquantified. Salinity caused ordinal downgrades across 13.53% of the footprint, but a pixelwise comparison showed no final-class change from adding the generalized deeper layer. Three nested soil–geology interpretations shared 98.01% of their candidate union. Additional tests exposed sensitivity beyond these recodings: raising each valid salinity category by one severity class reduced the coverage-adjusted Base candidate area by 14.17%, while 6.30% of candidates lay within a 90-m raster band around salinity-category or coverage edges. Later mapped establishment comprised 685 ha in 242 persistent Trees/Crops patches, or 0.0541% of baseline-stable land. High and Moderate contained 78.17% of this outcome on 58.93% of risk-set land, giving enrichment of 1.33. Spatial-block resampling ranges depended on block size and included enrichment below one at 10 km. Baseline and outcome share one land-cover product, and the image record raised concerns about some mapped transitions. The results support a regional shortlist for soil-profile, irrigation, drainage, infrastructure, and economic investigation, with no independent demonstration of date-palm identity or agronomic suitability.