Iraq’s “Garden of Eden” has recovered remarkably quickly since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The first detailed ecological analysis of the Mesopotamian marshes in southern Iraq, presented at a meeting of the British Ecological Society in Oxford, UK, on 5 September, has found that 39 per cent of marshlands have been flooded again, and native species are re-establishing themselves.
“This is due to the good quality and quantity of water now flowing down the Tigris and Euphrates due to several years of high snowmelt in Turkey and Iran,” says Curtis Richardson of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who coordinated the surveys of the area…
