Sustainable irrigation of date palms in the hyper-arid United Arab Emirates: a review

摘要

Dates (Phoenix dactylifera L.) are important for heritage, cultural, religious, and economic reasons in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. These regions are arid and hyper-arid and so the date palm-trees need to be irrigated. Traditionally,date palms were sustainably irrigated using groundwater resources. Since ancient times, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and across the Arabian Peninsula, so-called aflaj systems were used to supply water to irrigate the palms, inter alia. These aflajsystems drained groundwater from higher elevations under gravity through man-made tunnels eventually bringing the groundwater to the surface. From this now-surface source, water was then distributed through channels for irrigation, plus it was also usedfor household and religious purposes (http://whc.unesco.org/ en/list/1207/). In classical Arabic, aflaj (the singular is falaj) means to 'split into parts'. Dates were traditionally grown in surfaceirrigated basins in which there was usually also a cover crop that could grow under the canopy of the date palms.