Salinity Management in Arid Regions - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 415

21 SalinityManagement

inAridRegions
Lessons for Iraq from the
Western United States *

CONTENTS
Introduction............................................................................................................ 429
Scientific and Engineering Issues .......................................................................... 434
Relevant Applications ............................................................................................ 437
Application in the Iraq Marsh Context .................................................................. 441
Acknowledgment ...................................................................................................448
References.............................................................................................................. 449

INTRODUCTION
Growing plants in arid regions is a major challenge, relying upon careful manage-
ment of the scarce water resources (Figure 21.1). As water moves across rocks and
through soils, it dissolves salt which in turn becomes something that also needs care-
ful management, particularly in desert regions such as southern Iraq. Salt is seldom
managed as a solid unless there is an economic benefit to it or unless it's a last resort
as, for example, in evaporation ponds where some farmers make salt because they
have no other place to put it.
Water meets a range of needs in Iraq (Naff and Hanna 2002), including sup-
porting not only the marshes and their functions like fisheries but also rice and
other agricultural production, as well as supporting urban and industrial activi-
ties throughout the country. With all these competing uses, John Dickey and Mark
Madison (2004) of CH2MHILL believe that water will almost certainly be the lim-
iting factor for marsh restoration, particularly in relation to its role in salinity man-
agement. Some fairly sophisticated water budget and management models have been
developed for both the macro and regional scales in Iraq (France 2011). Today, while
natural flood peaks are greatly diminished by the dams, there are opportunities for
artificial annual flooding to create flood storage capacity which may be feasible in

* Adapted by Robert L. France from Dickey, J., and M. Madison. 2004. Moving salt and water in man-
aged ecosystems: Case studies from history and the western United States. Paper presented at the
Mesopotamian Marshes and Modern Development: Practical Approaches for Sustaining Ecological
and Cultural Landscapes conference, Cambridge, MA, October.

429