UAE research on Sahara dust wins Qatar grant

A biological research on the nutritive contribution of Sahara dust to the microbial productivity of the Arabian Gulf marine ecosystem has won $700,000 grant from the Qatar Foundation. This is a UAE University research project that has entered into a next phase with a focus on the role of Saharan dust. The project was started a couple of years ago by Professor Waleed Hamza from the Department of Biology at the UAEU. The first phase of the project, which was collaborated by the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen-Germany (MPI), was funded by Emirates Foundation. “This project is a continuity of what has been established at UAEU during the last two years,” said a spokesman of the university. The success of the UAEU team with the German team to reach concrete results has convinced the Qatar Foundation reviewers to grant this project as a collaborative project mainly between the Qatar Ministry of Environment and UAEU in collaboration with MPI and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), he said. The Project budget is $699,590 and will cover two years (2012-2014) and the areas between UAE and Qatar territories in both inland and coastal areas of the Arabian Gulf. It has been titled as the Nutritive Contribution of Sahara dust to the Microbial Productivity of the Arabian Gulf Marine Ecosystem: Sources, fluxes and possible pathways. The objective of the study is to understand the dust nutritive contribution to the Arabian Gulf Ecosystem productivity. It extends to identify source areas and trajectory from source to sink, comparing the nutritive contribution with published information on other major Sahara dust, studying the marine microbial activities role in transforming the leachable nutrients from dust to the Gulf ecosystem nutrient budget and linking with the knowledge of Sahara dust international research. “Of particular interest are the inputs of elements such as nitrogen, phosphorus and iron, which are essential for the biological growth of marine organisms,” said the official. The study plan set up and sampling will be carried out in collaboration with the team members from different research institutes. Obtained results from analyses and experiments will be treated both mathematically and statistically and merge into modelling to get an almost real evaluation of the contribution of dust blown from Arabia on the Arabian Gulf marine ecosystem, he noted.