UCASA Research Projects

The proposed project ponders the interplay of the availability of water and technological and societal adaptations in Oman, Dakhiliyah Region. In this setting, shrinking surface water bodies gave rise to the technology of aflaj, a hydraulic system that occasioned a substantial change in the local production systems. Taking a historical-geographical perspective, this research will explore the economic, societal and cultural repercussions of the irrigation technology and will focus in particular on the constitution of local communities in Oman.

This research aims to link the environmental history of Oman with the practical implications of aflaj technology and the adaptation strategies of local communities. Combining archaeological data with such primary sources as gazetteers, local histories, chronicles and endowment deeds, we intend to show the impact specific methods of water utilization had on local communities through a variety of social mechanisms like cooperation, aflaj maintenance, division of labor, and charitable endowments. The research results will lead to a better understanding of the role of water management systems and hydraulic technologies in the formation and evolution of social formations in Oman.

This research aims to delve deeply into the relationship between local communities and their water resources in Oman, Dakhiliyah Region, in a historical-geographical context. We wish to shed light on: 1- The environmental history of Oman with a focus on water resources. 2- The adaptation strategies of local communities to fluctuating water resources. 3- The role of water management systems and hydraulic technologies in the formation and evolution of social cohesiveness

Lamad project is aimed to incorporate the modern technologies into the aflaj traditional water management, by using the capacity of internet and smart cellphones in aflaj irrigation timing. The project is supposed to be carried out for a falaj as a pilot project, and then more aflaj will be involved based on the pilot results. The farmers will be able to keep track of their turn on the irrigation cycle (dawran) and the situation of their water shares at any time. This project can also contribute to tourism sector, since the visitors can see the names and order of water shares on a digital screen at the exit point of falaj, which will give them a handle on how the falaj water division system works.

Lamad system is one of the digital systems or innovative websites, which pertains to the management of the timing of Omani aflaj irrigation, and hinges on creating a system through which irrigation is automated according to the same rules and principles as that of aflaj. Lamad application allows the owners of Omani farms to keep track of their shares on the irrigation cycle. This system has been named after “al-Lamad”, referred to as a special Omani sundial that was used to calculate the irrigation time by means of sunlight in the rural regions.

This project is aimed to introduce new technologies and sciences to the aflaj communities in the light of Oman’s general approach towards industrialization. This project serves to preserve the historical and cultural values of water supply systems, which are a crucial part of Omani civilization. It also helps to archive the information of aflaj water management, which would otherwise sink into oblivion due to the aflaj elderly practitioners passing away. Lamad project consists of three main components as follows: the website, digital system, a smart application (LMD) for cellphones.

The aflaj systems have played a significant role in supporting sustainable water resource management in arid and semiarid regions, making a notable contribution to the socioeconomic development of the country. The alteration of land use and land cover (LULC) in arid and semiarid regions can have significant consequences for hydrological systems, affecting the ability of local ecosystems to manage fresh surface and groundwater resources. These changes are often caused by both natural and anthropogenic factors. To investigate the impact of LULC changes on aflaj systems in the northern of Oman, we utilized satellite imagery, aflaj data, and spatial analytical and image processing techniques within the framework of geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing. In the first part of the study, we quantified the changes in LULC and their impact on aflaj systems in seven cities in Oman due to urban expansion. In the second part, we evaluated the effect of LULC on groundwater for four major aflaj between 1985 and 2021. The study area was divided into four primary LULC classifications: vegetation, bodies of water, metropolitan areas, and bare soil. The classification maps demonstrated a high overall accuracy of 90% to 95%, indicating satisfactory performance. Our results revealed a significant reduction in vegetation areas between 1985 and 2021, primarily shifting from bare soil (BS) to urban areas (UAs) and from vegetation cover (VC) to BS,due to the reduction of groundwater resources. Over the four study periods (1985–1990, 1990–2000,2000–2013, and 2013–2021), the percentages of the total area of Falaj Al-Muyasser, Falaj Daris, Falaj Al-Maliki, and Falaj Al-Khatmeen that transformed from agricultural lands to UAs were 40%, 39%,32%, and 8%, respectively. Our study highlights the need for appropriate land management and planning to ensure the most effective solutions are utilized to meet social and economic sustainability requirements. In conclusion, our study presents a comprehensive analysis of LULC changes and their impact on aflaj systems over a 36-year period, providing new insights into the potential effects of LULC changes on groundwater resources and offering a basis for informed decision making on land management in arid and semiarid areas.

This research conducted and developed model using Support vector machine (SVM) and extreme gradient boosting (XGB) machine learning models to predict groundwater aflaj potential in the Nizwa watershed in the Sultanate of Oman (Oman).

The groundwater aflaj potential maps were categorised into five classes: deficient, low, moderate, high, and very high. Based on theevaluation of accuracy in the training stage, the following models showed a high level of accuracy based on the area under the curve: Bayesian-XGB (0.99), GS-XGB (0.97), RS-XGB (0.96), SVM (0.96), and XGB (0.93).

The validation results showed that the Bayesian hyperparameter algorithm significantly increased XGB model efficiency in modelling groundwater aflaj potential. The highest percentages of groundwater potential in the very high class were the XGB (10%), SVM (8%), GS-XGB (6%), RS-XGB (6%), and Bayesian-XGB (6%) models. Most of these areas were located in the central and northeast parts of the case study area. The study concluded that evaluating existing groundwater datasets, facilities, current, and future spatial datasets is critical in order to design systems capable of mapping groundwater aflaj based on geospatial and ML techniques. In turn, groundwater protection service projects and integrated water source management (IWSM) programs will be able to protect the aflaj irrigation system from threats by implementing timely preventative measures.

This study will look into the hypothesis that increasing the number of conditioning factors in a dataset used in wadi flood modeling will improve the accuracy of the final susceptibility mapping result. Furthermore, this study examines the effect of individual conditioning factors on flood susceptibility mapping and their significance in the development of precise mapping of potential flood regions. Two robust machine learning approaches, Decision Tree (DT) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), will be used to evaluate spatial correlations between flood conditioning factors and rate their importance for mapping flood prone areas. Two datasets will be used for this purpose: dataset 1: altitude, slope, aspect, curvature, Stream Power Index (SPI), Topographic Wetness Index (TWI), Topographic Roughness Index (TRI), and Sediment Transport Index (STI) derived factors, and dataset 2: a combination of LiDAR derived factors supplemented by geology, soil, land-use/cover (LULC), distance from roads, and distance from rivers parameters. A Resent cyclone that hit Oman's Al Batinah (North and South) governorate will be used as a case study, and both DT and SVM techniques will be used, with both datasets. Multi-collinearity, variance inflation factors (VIF), Pearson's correlation coefficients, and Cohen's kappa analysis will also be used to provide useful information about the inter-relationships of factors, as well as the influence of each factor on the precision of the final map. For accuracy evaluation, the area under the curve (AUC) method will be used. Despite extensive studies on the threats of flooding, our knowledge, nothing has been done to identify the conditioning factors on flood susceptibility mapping and their importance in the construction of precise mapping of potential flood in the study area. Planners and engineers can utilize the susceptibility mapping to help with development plans and land use planning.

Groundwater resources are the main water resources in Oman. Various factors, such as population growth, lack of precipitation, and so on, lead to the reduction of these resources on a regular basis. Therefore, it is required to have a comprehensive dynamic model to determine all the effective elements of groundwater resources and then find the interaction among them. It provides water decision makers with a pervasive aquifer planning and management model. As a test case, this study aims to create a dynamic groundwater model for the Nizwa basin and identify each element involved in its groundwater balance. Vensim software can address this issue and is used to achieve this goal. After modeling with Vensim software, the result is then entered into a new numerical method called particle filter-meshless local Petrov-Galerkin (PF-MLPG) to determine groundwater head. This study is therefore vital and necessary for this basin and provides water decision makers with all the information they need about groundwater.

Objectives:

Increasing population, limited surface water resources, and the excessive use of groundwater in the Nizwa basin have all resulted in facing with irreparable damage to groundwater resources in this region. This dry region relies on groundwater resources as its only reliable and permanent source of water, particularly during droughts. Deep wells have been drilled and excavated without controlled monitoring in this study area causing an annual drawdown of the groundwater table. Consequently, based on the predictions made about climate change and drought event in this region, the decreasing groundwater level in its aquifer, and also, the accelerating growth of agricultural and industrial activities in the region, there is concern about the departure of the process from sustainable development. The purpose of this research is to study the interaction of water resources, in this case mainly groundwater resources, with agricultural, drinking, industrial and other consumptions under different water shocks. In general, in order to achieve the goal of the research, the following points have been taken into consideration:

1. Creation of dynamic groundwater model of Nizwa basin in order to find the both relation and interaction between consumptions and groundwater resource.
2. Investigation of the effects of agriculture, industries, drinking water, domestic and other consumptions on the aquifer.
3. Identification the effects of flowrate changes of aflaj systems on consumption as well as the groundwater resource
4. Identification the effects of flowrate changes of aflaj systems on consumption as well as the groundwater resource
5. Investigation of the effects of excavation of new extraction wells on both consumption and groundwater system
6. Computation of groundwater balance in the case study under some scenarios
7. Development of numerical groundwater model on Nizwa basin with usage of accurate PF-MLPG method
8. Determination of groundwater head in each point of aquifer.

This study is about the investigation of the archaeohydrological condition of falaj Al-Sahamah and proposes strategies for its rehabilitation. The falaj which is for 800 years ago, is an ancient system of water channels used for irrigation, holds significant historical and cultural value. By examining the current condition of falaj Al-Sahamah and assessing its hydraulic and structural components, this study aims to understand its historical significance, flowrate and cultivation area and also to identify potential issues or deterioration, and recommend measures for its restoration and sustainable use. The research purpose is to contribute for the preservation of this important cultural heritage site while ensuring its functionality for agricultural purposes in the present day.

Aflaj systems can be found in over 40 countries throughout the world. The term aflaj refers to a horizontal network of underground tunnels that collects and transports groundwater from mountainous zones to towns or settlements. Thus, it is similar to a natural water-bearing structure or aquifer. Despite extensive studies on the threats to the aflaj systems of Oman, to our knowledge, previous research on this topic is confined to isolated case studies. Hence, the data sourced from the literature are neither representative of the aflaj of Oman nor comprehensive in scope. The proposed project is intended to conduct field research and construct a comprehensive and strategic data set based on a large-scale, representative sample of the aflaj in Oman.

The overall goals of this project are (1) to develop and model the spatiotemporal geographical distribution of the aflaj systems in Oman based on the interactions of those factors with various biological and socioeconomic variables and (2) to protect the aflaj systems using remote sensing and spatial modelling techniques. The investigations will be conducted to gain a clearer understanding in four key research areas concerning these systems, namely (a) spatiotemporal assessments, (b) impacts of biological variables, (c) impacts of anthropogenic variables, and (d) predictions of spatial patterns based on the abovementioned variables. These fundamental research areas will be studied through extensive (large-scale) field investigations, sampling and laboratory testing, and detailed analyses. Since the aflaj systems exert hydrological, environmental, climatological, and economic impacts as well as affect the humans around them, ensuring their sustainability requires integrated efforts.

As in other arid subtropical countries, lack of animal feed is the biggest obstacle to livestock development in the Sultanate of Oman. Apart from raw feed ingredients imported from abroad and processed locally into concentrates, pasture and range constitute the major sources of feed. In the country, there are a few irrigated forages that are used for ruminant feeding, such as alfalfa and Rhodes grass. In addition to irrigated pastures and rangelands, natural pastures and rangelands are under severe stress due to drought, salinity, and overgrazing. As Oman's major tree crop, date palms yield a variety of by-products that can be used to feed livestock, including low-quality dates, date pits, fronds, and fiber, as well as syrup made from date palms. In this study, therefore, we propose to investigate the effect of feeding an Omani livestock supplement made up of local feed sources (date palm fronds, dates, fish meal, and moringa leaves) on performance and meat quality. By determining their proximate composition, as well as carbohydrates, minerals, vitamins, and other components, the chemical composition of the ingredients will be evaluated. Drying, crushing, and grinding will be done on fronds from date palms, dates, and moringa leaves. For determining their nutritional value, they will undergo chemical analyses as well as in vitro and in vivo experiments. Then they can be included in various levels of native sheep rations. Growth, carcass composition, and meat quality will be evaluated by measuring feed intake and feeding these rations. The digestibility of feeds will be determined in vivo. During feeding trials, the quality and composition of the carcass will be evaluated along with feed intake and body weight growth. By using alternative protein and energy sources in animal feed, farmers can reduce production costs and increase revenue.

Investigators:

1. Principal Investigator (PI): Dr. Said Shannan Al-Khalasi, Assistant Professor at UNESCO Chair on Aflaj Studies and Archaeo-hydrology, University of Nizwa
2. Co-PI: Dr. Abdullah Saif Al-Ghafri, Professor of UNESCO chair on Aflaj Studies- Archaeo-hyrology, University of Nizwa.
3. Co-PI (2) Dr. Hani El-Zaiat, Assistan Professor, Department of Animal and Veterinary Sciences, College of Agricultural and Marine Sciences, Sultan Qaboos University.