Desert River Water Reservation

Rivers in arid regions often play a critical role in people’s lives, landscape changes, ecological evolution, and socio-economic development. Meanwhile, many rivers have been strongly influenced by the accelerated expansion of human interventions like land reclamation and flow regulation. As riparian ecosystems are disturbed, people’s lives are affected and desertification is aggravated. Tarim River, located in Taklamakan Desert, China, was selected as the testing ground to investigate water-balance and water-saving strategies to restore the degraded desert river, by balancing the desert river’s resilience and humans’ water demand and preventing middle and lower streams from disappearing in the desert, while at the same time improving socio-economic development.