Salinity Management in Arid Regions - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 431

• Balance water spreading with supply and salinity goals in terms of sizing

the restored marsh for the projected flow (e.g., if the marsh is too big, the
water will be spread too thinly and problems will ensue).

• Protect renewed water flow with durable agreements.

The goal in all this is to blend efficiency, reuse drainage, encourage tolerant plant com-
munities, and develop and capitalize on new and indigenous knowledge to promote
salt management for the creation of desired values (Dickey and Madison 2004).
It will probably never be possible to restore the freshwater Iraqi marshes to their
full areal grandeur given the projections of water that will be available based on
upstream hydrodevelopment. But it will be possible to have a large region of the
marsh preserved with the same historic water quality, and with negotiations of in-
stream flows it is possible that this area might be expanded over time. Probably
the biggest opportunity is to enlarge the marsh area with low-quality water from
agricultural drainage or the water that currently comes out of the marshes that can
be placed in another area to be managed separately and that might be restored with
halophytic plants collected from further downstream in the estuary where the water
is saltier (Dickey and Madison 2004). The strategy here is to bring those plants and
fish northward to create another ecosystem rather than draining that poor-quality
water out of the wetland system entirely. And this could be repeated again with
plants brought up all the way from the delta to create inland seawater marshes in
which perhaps shrimp farming could take place. The idea here is to create a mosaic
of marshes of ranging salinity depending on water sources and quality. So though
the full area could become wet again, it would be a different kind of wet, with dif-
ferent types of vegetation, aquatic life, and value. The bottom line is that one can
accommodate a high degree of salinity if one is accepting of creating different habi-
tats. Even highly concentrated salt sinks, it is important to note, have habitat value
with lots of bird use. One particularly informative example in this regard is the Al
Wathba Nature Reserve outside of Abu Dhabi City in the United Arab Emirates
(Figure 21.4). Here water from a domestic sewage treatment plant is reclaimed to
provide wildlife habitat. The problem, however, is that the area is underlain by a
unique form of encrusted salt deposits called sabkha (Figure 21.5), which has con-
tributed to very high salinity levels of the water. Rather than attempt to reduce the
salt concentrations, managers actively manipulate the water levels to allow for the
development of a healthy brine shrimp population (Anonymous 2006), which in turn
attracts flamingos (Figure 21.6), the first breeding population of such on the Arabian
Peninsula in almost a century (Anonymous 2004).
The United Nations Environment Programme's recommendations for restoring
the marshlands (Patrow 2001) include the following:

• International agreements on sharing the Tigris and Euphrates waters

• Mitigation of dam impacts on downstream ecosystems

• Reestablishing the flood regime

• Protecting water quality

• Reevaluating the role of engineering works

• Designation of protected areas