Wetlands represent a very small area of the earth's land surface. These ecosystems are ecologically and economically valuable. However, they continue to be among the world's most threatened ecosystems. Successful conservation of these areas relies on accurate mapping and monitoring. Therefore, the current work suggested a protocol for mapping the wetlands along the Mediterranean Sea Coast of Egypt using remote sensing and GIS techniques. El-Bardawil and El-Burullus regions were selected as the

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... tudy areas for the current work. The proposed protocol included a sequence of image pre-processing and processing steps. The pre-processing steps included linear stretch, noise reduction, relative sun angle correction, resolution merge, mosaicking and finally subsetting of the images for only the study area. The image processing included the principal component analysis (PCA) and image classification. Two principal component analyses were applied namely; a general PCA of all the bands of both ASTER and ETM+ data and a specific PCA of only the shortwave and the thermal infrared bands. The first and second layers of both PCAs were stacked into one image for each data type and used in the image classification. Accordingly, the overall mapping accuracy of the ETM+ data ranged from 82.7 to 90.7%, while it ranged from 86.3 to 92.2 % in the case of ASTER data.