Elsy Ibrahim

University of Liège | ulg · Department of Architecture, Geology, Environment & Constructions (ArGEnCo)

Global demand for gold is growing through the manufacture of jewellery and electronic products. The growing demand for gold is met through both large and small-scale mining. Thus, there is also an increasing number of informal Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM) activities in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South/Latin America. This paper, the...

Greater Beirut Area (GBA) is expected to suffer from various socio-economic burdens caused by climate change impacts, including those related to rising temperatures, reduced water availability, increased heat waves and heat island effect, and others. This study addresses future changes in water demand in GBA through utilizing water demand patterns,...

This paper discusses opportunities to use remote sensing (RS) technologies in addressing the persistent global challenges related to the artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector. The paper uses a systematic literature review to identify, analyze, and synthesize various uses of RS on the detection and monitoring of ASGM activities across...

Medium resolution satellite data, such as Sentinel-2 of the Copernicus programme, offer great new opportunities for the agricultural sector, and provide insights on soil surface characteristics and their management. Soil monitoring requires a high-quality dataset of uncovered and plastic covered agricultural soil. We developed a methodology to iden...

Earth Observation (EO) data can become an essential tool in the transformation of a raw materials sector that aims to reconfigure its model of operation. The high demand for the mineral resources necessary for the transition to a carbon neutral and circular economy conflicts with the increasing difficulties of finding new deposits. As the sector he...

Small-scale placer mining in Colombia takes place in rural areas and involves excavations resulting in large footprints of bare soil and water ponds. Such excavated areas comprise a mosaic of challenging terrains for cloud and cloud-shadow detection of Sentinel-2 (S2A and S2B) data used to identify, map, and monitor these highly dynamic activities....

Informal small-scale mining is spread in many countries and provides livelihood to numerous families in rural areas yet often with devastating social and environmental impacts. The alluvial gold mining process in Colombia, also known as placer mining, involves excavations using heavy machinery and creates large footprints of bare soil and mining po...

Over the decades, anthropogenic air emissions have resulted in the degradation of ambient air quality and posed major health risks. In this context, efforts have increased to understand the dispersion of pollutants in the earth's atmosphere, their spatiotemporal patterns, and long-term effect on climate. Of interest in this domain is the relationsh...

With the prevailing tendencies worldwide to divert waste from landfills and to limit the global temperature increase to below 2oC, generating energy from waste is being promoted as a smart strategy to “kill two birds with one stone”. While bioenergy industry has been proven to be financially feasible in some developed countries, the viability of st...

Mining is fundamental for human development, yet it currently requires innovative spatial techniques as it faces diverse environmental and social pressures. With the free Sentinel-2 data of the Copernicus programme, new opportunities arise for studies related to nickel laterite, especially with its reported potential in mapping iron-oxide. This wor...

With the free Sentinel-2 (S2) data of the Copernicus programme, new opportunities arise for the mining community that can ease its environmental and social challenges through improved monitoring. At the moment, most users worldwide need to process S2 data to achieve surface reflectance. There are recent powerful open-source developments in atmosphe...

The construction industry is on the rise with an expected increase in cement demand by 15% by 2030, thus resulting in an increase in energy demand. Several countries have opted for Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF), produced from Municipal Solid Waste (MSW), to reduce the cost of cement production. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), this idea has...

The RawMatCop programme was launched in 2017 and aims to develop skills, expertise, demonstrations, and applications of Copernicus data to the raw materials sector. It is co-funded by the European Commission (DG for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs) and the EIT RawMaterials (RawMaterials Academy). Raw materials have become incre...

Thermal remote sensing can be very helpful for landfill monitoring since biogas generation leads to an increase in temperature during the aerobic and anaerobic digestion processes. The objective of this study is to derive the land surface temperature (LS) of Naameh Landfill – located in Lebanon – and its surroundings in different seasons using Land...

The regional-scale consistency between four precipitation products from the GPCC, TRMM, WM, and CMORPH datasets over the Arabian Peninsula was assessed. Their macroscale relationships were inter-compared with soil moisture and total water storage (TWS) estimates from AMSR-E and GRACE. The consistency analysis was studied with multivariate statistic...

Thermal infrared remote sensing was used to investigate the land surface temperature variation between the Naameh landfill and its surroundings during the winter and summer seasons. Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager and Thermal Infrared Sensor were used to retrieve at-sensor temperature, which was corrected for atmospheric effects using three diffe...

Remote sensing has been successfully utilized to distinguish and quantify sediment properties in the intertidal environment. Classification approaches of imagery are popular and powerful yet can lead to site- and case-specific results. Such specificity creates challenges for temporal studies. Thus, this paper investigates the use of regression mode...

Earth dams in Lebanon are typically used in remote agricultural areas where irrigation channels and large-scale reservoirs are not available. The use of non-invasive techniques for earth dam applications can be a significant step in the efficient monitoring of such structures, especially in Lebanon where there is substantial risk of earth dam failu...

Naameh landfill is a vital sanitary landfill for Lebanon that started in 1997 and was closed in 2015 and the reutilized for an emergency phase in 2016. It served Lebanon's capital, Beirut and the Caza of Mount Lebanon. Ever since the landfill was active, it faced various controversies as it was originally meant to be an emergency plan for a short p...

Anaerobic digestion under psychrophilic conditions (ambient temperature) was used to treat a mixture of food and landscape waste. A pilot scale anaerobic digester was built to test the efficiency of the process as the variation of methane (CH4) generation with respect to variation in daily ambient temperature. At the end of the 13 week experiment,...

This work aims to be an initial investigation to the use of geophysical and limited geotechnical data to obtain soil and stratigraphy characterization. This approach is essential for developing countries where geotechnical data is typically scarce and expensive. This type of consolidation was used on a study area in Lebanon that consists of a faile...

To investigate bio-chemical processes of intertidal sediments, variations in sediment properties such as moisture content, mud content, and chlorophyll a content need to be understood. Remote sensing has been an efficient alternative to traditional data collection methods for such properties. Yet, with the availability of various types of useful se...

The aim of this study is to set a foundation for mapping Beirut soils using available soil reports obtained from excavations. With the availability of a certain number of excavations and soil reports, one could attempt to gather soil data in order to understand the subbase and map the stratigraphy of the city. However, only a limited number of bore...

The aim of this study is to assess the suitability of four spaceborne multispectral sensors (Spot 5 HRG, Landsat 5 TM, Landsat 7 ETM+, and IKONOS) for inter-tidal sediment characterization, in comparison to a hyperspectral image of 4m×4m spatial resolution and 116 spectral bands. Four sediment properties were considered: organic matter content, moi...

The quantification and monitoring of sediment dynamics in estuaries has received plenty of attention in recent years due to both economic and environmental interests. Numerical models have been widely applied for predicting the morphodynamic evolution of these areas. However, the degree of uncertainty of these models is often very high due to the l...

Intertidal sediment stability is related to physical, biological, and chemical properties of sediments. To characterize these properties, extensive field work is required. Since field sampling on intertidal flats can be inefficient, unsupervised analysis of remotely sensed data offers an alternative. In this study, three unsupervised classification...

ntertidal sediment stability is related to physical, biological, and chemical properties of sediments. To characterize these properties, extensive field work is required. Since field sampling on intertidal flats can be inefficient, unsupervised analysis of remotely sensed data offers an alternative. In this study, three unsupervised classification...