UF Scientist Among Planners For Post-War Iraq Wetlands Restoration

February 27, 2003

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — As the U.S. military gets ready for a possible war in Iraq, an international group of scientists is gearing up for a major project that could take place after such a war: restoring a huge wetland systematically drained by Saddam Hussein.

The group of about 10 scientists, which includes Thomas Crisman, a professor of environmental engineering sciences and director of UF’s Howard T. Odum Center for Wetlands, comprises the technical advisory board to the restoration project, officially known as “Eden Again.” The scientists met for the first time earlier this month in Los Angeles.

“We’re starting off with the basics,” Crisman said. “We’re trying to figure out, ‘Can we restore the ecology, and can we restore the culture of the people who lived in these marshes?’”

Bounded by the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers in southern Iraq, the marsh once covered nearly 3,500 square miles and was home to numerous rare or endangered birds and other species. It also provided important food and nursery grounds for shrimp and fish in the Persian Gulf. In the early 1990s, Hussein’s engineers built huge channels and canals to drain it, Crisman said. The activity was ostensibly for agricultural purposes, but the real goal was to put down rebellion among its inhabitants, a people known as the “marsh Arabs” whose culture is thousands of years old, Crisman said. Today, the marsh has been reduced to as little as 500 square miles, and the roughly 500,000 marsh Arabs are largely dispersed in Iraq, Iran and neighboring countries, he said.

Crisman said the goal of the project is both to restore the marsh ecosystem and to make it attractive for the marsh Arabs to return to their homeland. “We’re looking at it from the scientific side, but the challenge is to restore both the ecology and the culture,” he said.

Crisman, an expert in the ecology, management and conservation of wetlands in the subtropics and tropics, was as selected for the task force in part because of his extensive work restoring wetlands in Greece and the Mediterranean. He collaborated on that work with George Zalidis, a professor of soil and water resources at Aristotle University in Greece and also a member of the technical advisory board. Eden Again is being overseen by the Iraq Foundation, an Iraqi opposition group based in the United States. It has received an initial grant of from the U.S. State Department and plans to seek more funding if the project goes forward.