Welcome to SuMaRiO - Sustainable Management of River Oases along the Tarim River
The overarching goal of SuMaRiO is to support oasis management along the Tarim River under conditions of climatic and societal changes. A main result envisaged is to develop an indicator-based Decision Support System (DSS) that allows a Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) within regional planning. This SIA will take into account the perspectives of all relevant actors and consider relevant Ecosystem Services (ESS) in the problem field of land and water management in the Tarim River Basin. The perspectives will be obtained and analyzed through a transdisciplinary research process. Then, under given scenario assumptions, possible actions and their impacts are estimated. In the implementation phase, the goal is to train Chinese partners in the use of the English and Chinese DSS.
The Tarim River is one of the largest inland rivers in the world and located in the Northwest of China. It is known worldwide for its natural resources, extreme climatic and hydrologic situation and vulnerable ecosystems. The river basin covers one million square kilometres. A large part of the basin is a relatively flat desert region with a mean annual precipitation of around 40 mm per year and has more than 3000 mm of evapotranspiration. Water resources are mainly provided by high mountain precipitation, seasonal snow and glacier melting which feed the Tarim River through its tributaries. Water resources and ecosystem stability are the most obvious and sensitive issues in this hyper-arid area.
During the past five decades, intensive exploitation of water resources, mainly by agricultural water consumption, has resulted in changes of the temporal and spatial distribution of water resources and has caused serious environmental problems in the Tarim River Basin. The ecosystems and the ecological processes dominated by natural vegetation are seriously impacted by water diversion for irrigation purposes. The SuMaRiO cluster (Sustainable Management of River Oases along the Tarim River / China) aims at changingthe land management strategies in the River Oases towards more sustainability under serious environmental challenges. This will have positive effects for nearly 10 million habitants, of which 80% are ethnic minorities. In consideration of the ecosystem functions and ecosystem services of the environment, SuMaRiO will analyze best solutions integrating
social, economic and ecologic issues.
