<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><article>
  <title>Guelta in Saudi Arabia: a Remote Sensing Approach</title>

      <doi>https://doi.org/10.21276/AATCCReview.2025.13.02.393</doi>
  
  <authors>
      </authors>

      <abstract><![CDATA[<p>Water is the source of life. Identifying small water bodies in rocky terrain (Guelta) becomes important<br />
especially in desert regions with limited rain throughout the year. Saudi Arabia has many of these gueltas yet<br />
their locations are not entirely known nor the ecosystem surrounding it is sufficiently studied. In this project<br />
we have combined GIS with remote sensing to build an automated supervised classifier to identify these<br />
gueltas. Before that can be used, the full cycle of data preprocessing and data quality checks were<br />
implemented to clean the data. In terms of accuracy of known gueltas, ground truth locations were assessed<br />
which revealed 70% of gueltas were correctly classified. Further more, random sampling technique was used<br />
for 20 random coordinates, out of which five turned out to be gueltas. Also spectral signature plots were used<br />
to study each Guelta independently. In this work we have identified an initial</p>
]]></abstract>
  
  <body><![CDATA[<div class="aatcc-article-container"><div class="aatcc-category-label">Original Research Article</div><div class="aatcc-meta-box"><div class="aatcc-doi-wrap">
            <a class="aatcc-doi-btn" href="https://doi.org/10.21276/AATCCReview.2025.13.02.393" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.21276/AATCCReview.2025.13.02.393</a>
        </div><div class="aatcc-abstract-section">
                <h3>Abstract</h3>
                <div class="aatcc-abstract-text"><p>Water is the source of life. Identifying small water bodies in rocky terrain (Guelta) becomes important<br />
especially in desert regions with limited rain throughout the year. Saudi Arabia has many of these gueltas yet<br />
their locations are not entirely known nor the ecosystem surrounding it is sufficiently studied. In this project<br />
we have combined GIS with remote sensing to build an automated supervised classifier to identify these<br />
gueltas. Before that can be used, the full cycle of data preprocessing and data quality checks were<br />
implemented to clean the data. In terms of accuracy of known gueltas, ground truth locations were assessed<br />
which revealed 70% of gueltas were correctly classified. Further more, random sampling technique was used<br />
for 20 random coordinates, out of which five turned out to be gueltas. Also spectral signature plots were used<br />
to study each Guelta independently. In this work we have identified an initial</p>
</div>
            </div><div class="aatcc-pdf-wrap">
            <a class="aatcc-pdf-btn" href="https://aatcc.peerjournals.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Guelta-in-Saudi-Arabia-a-Remote-Sensing-Approach.pdf" target="_blank">View / Download PDF</a>
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