Research Profiles

In the last few decades, Qatar’s economy has witnessed a rapid economic growth with amazing infrastructures development coined to its petrochemical industry. However, this development had a cost of environmental degradation; “a major challenge” that poses severe threat to Qatar’s sustaining its rapid prosperity. To address this issue, several initiatives in the last decades under the environment sustainability pillar of Qatar National Vision (QNV-2030) have been developed for identifying the most appropriate ways to probe the challenge. However, until now the country’s environment indicators are not promising, thereby driving rulers, policy makers and researchers to look for the most sophisticated and powerful analytical methods determining large-scale patterns of pollutants distribution and to forecast its impacts over-time. To explore this potential, we propose to apply state-of-art cutting-edge dendrochronological techniques to develop long chronologies of various shrubs and tree species along the urban-rural gradient to reconstruct the pollution record in Qatar. Our proposed use of tree-ring multi-species ring-width time series as proxies will lengthen and expand the existing pollutants record and will provide robust baseline data on the historical range of variability in atmospheric conditions. Results obtained from this pilot project will provide a better context for interpreting contemporary as well as projected changes in pollutant conditions. The methods used in this study can be more widely applied to nearby regions in Qatar and other middle-east countries.