The study was conducted as a mixed-methods investigation with public health stakeholders in the UAE between November 2024 and February 2025. The published analysis concentrates on the qualitative strand of the data, which came from two complementary sources: open-ended responses in an online survey completed by 19 participants, and semi-structured interviews with 12 senior decision-makers. Rather than treating these datasets separately, the researchers integrated the survey’s free-text answers with the interview transcripts and analysed them thematically as a single dataset, a technique that strengthens the depth of interpretation when participant numbers are small. The authors are explicit that the findings describe this bounded group of experts in depth rather than producing generalisable estimates for the entire workforce.

Two established frameworks anchored the analysis. The first is the WHO–ASPHER Competency Framework, developed by the World Health Organization together with the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region, which defines the knowledge, skills and behaviours that a modern public health professional should command, from epidemiology and health protection to leadership, ethics and communication. The second is the WHO Health System Building Blocks Framework, which decomposes a health system into six core components: service delivery, the health workforce, health information systems, access to essential medicines, financing, and governance. By reading stakeholder testimony through both lenses simultaneously, the team could connect individual-level skill gaps to system-level structural weaknesses, a technical move that distinguishes this study from simpler workforce surveys.

The thematic analysis surfaced six overarching themes: fragmented governance, competency and training gaps, misalignment between curriculum and practice, Emiratization and career barriers, lessons drawn from COVID-19, and the need for a unified national strategy. Each theme represents a distinct failure mode, but the researchers emphasise that they are interlocking. Fragmented governance, for example, is not merely an administrative inconvenience; it fragments workforce planning itself, so that different institutions train, credential and deploy public health staff against different assumptions. When governance is disjointed, competency frameworks lose their anchoring function, because no single body is responsible for defining what a public health professional in the country should be able to do.

Among the most consequential findings is the limited awareness and use of competency frameworks among stakeholders. International frameworks such as WHO–ASPHER exist precisely to give workforce planners a common vocabulary: they specify the domains in which practitioners must be proficient and allow education providers to design curricula that map onto real occupational requirements. If practising managers and policymakers are largely unaware of these tools, the link between training and employment breaks down. The study found exactly this weak alignment between education and practice, with academic programmes not consistently reflecting the competencies that public health roles in Abu Dhabi actually demand. Graduates may therefore enter the workforce with credentials that employers do not fully recognise, and employers may struggle to articulate the skills they need in a form that educators can act upon.

The question of Emiratization, the national policy of increasing Emirati participation in the workforce, emerged as a theme with particular technical and social complexity. Stakeholders reported limited Emiratization in public health roles specifically, alongside career barriers that discourage nationals from entering or remaining in the field. Public health occupies an awkward position in many health labour markets: it is neither clinical medicine, with its clear prestige and licensure pathways, nor administration, with its conventional civil-service ladders. Without defined career structures, competency-based promotion criteria and visible professional identity, the field struggles to attract and retain national talent. The study suggests that workforce reform cannot be separated from career-pathway design; training pipelines only function when there is a destination at the end of them.

The COVID-19 pandemic functions as both backdrop and catalyst throughout the findings. The authors note that reforming the public health workforce in Abu Dhabi and across the UAE became increasingly urgent during and after the pandemic, alongside wider pressures from evolving public health challenges and health-system transformation. Pandemics are, in effect, unrequested stress tests of workforce planning. They expose shortfalls in surveillance capacity, outbreak investigation, risk communication and health information systems, and they reveal whether governance structures can coordinate across emirates and federal institutions at speed. The stakeholders in this study treated the pandemic experience as a source of concrete lessons about where the UAE’s public health machinery performed well and where structural fragilities appeared, and the researchers folded those lessons directly into their thematic framework.

Governance and policy, together with education and training, were the concerns most consistently raised across both data sources, the survey’s open-ended items and the interviews. That convergence matters methodologically. When two independent modes of data collection, one written and asynchronous, the other conversational and probing, produce the same priority concerns, the risk that findings are artefacts of a single instrument diminishes. The institutional landscape that stakeholders described involves multiple actors, including the Department of Health, the Abu Dhabi Public Health Centre, and the Ministry of Health and Prevention, operating across federal and emirate-level jurisdictions. Fragmentation across these governance structures, the study reports, impedes coherent workforce planning and dilutes accountability for implementing reform.

The study’s conclusions translate these findings into a reform agenda with clearly specified components. The authors argue that public health workforce reform in Abu Dhabi requires a coordinated cross-sector response that aligns competencies, curricula, regulation and career pathways, while strengthening governance, integration and long-term sustainability. In practical terms, that means adopting a national competency framework as the reference standard for job descriptions, accreditation and continuing professional development; redesigning academic curricula so that they map onto that framework; establishing regulatory recognition of public health as a distinct professional discipline; and building career ladders that make the field attractive to Emirati graduates. Each element reinforces the others, which is why the researchers frame the agenda as systemic rather than piecemeal.

The research also carries significance beyond the Gulf. Many health systems, in high-income and middle-income countries alike, confront the same triad of weak workforce data, unclear competency standards and fragmented governance, and the World Health Organization has repeatedly identified health workforce strengthening as one of the binding constraints on universal health coverage and pandemic preparedness. By applying internationally recognised frameworks to a specific national context and publishing the results open access, the team has produced a template that other countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council and beyond can adapt. The study was supported by a research grant from United Arab Emirates University and approved by the university’s Institutional Review Board, with informed consent obtained from all participants. Its authors, spanning institutions in the UAE, Portugal, the Netherlands, Poland and the Czech Republic, present the work as a pathway toward evidence-based policy, and the evidence they have assembled suggests that the pathway runs directly through the people who make public health happen.

Subject of Research: Public health workforce reform and competency-based workforce planning in Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates

Article Title: Public health workforce reform in Abu Dhabi: a pathway to evidence-based policy and global standards alignment

Article References: Al Qadiri, T., Elbarazi, I., Elkonaisi, I., Paulo, M. S., Sheek-Hussein, M., Koornneef, E., Czabanowska, K., & Grivna, M. (2026). Public health workforce reform in Abu Dhabi: a pathway to evidence-based policy and global standards alignment. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10518-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10518-x

Keywords: public health workforce, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, WHO-ASPHER Competency Framework, health workforce planning, competency frameworks, medical education, health policy, Emiratization, COVID-19, governance, BMC Medical Education

Planktonic foraminifera are among the most studied groups of organisms in the entire ocean. Roughly 50 living species inhabit the modern ocean, distributed from tropical to polar waters, and their fossil shells form vast chalk deposits on the seafloor. Because different species prefer different water temperatures, salinities, and nutrient levels, their shells serve as powerful archives of past climate and ocean chemistry. Yet in the Arabian Gulf — a shallow, semi-enclosed basin where evaporation far exceeds freshwater input and salinity routinely exceeds 40 practical salinity units — these organisms were thought to be largely absent, confined to the deeper, better-connected waters near the Gulf’s only oceanic inlet, the Strait of Hormuz.

The new study, led by Sinatrya D. Prayudi of King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals together with Thomas Steuber of Khalifa University and Michael A. Kaminski, examined 20 sediment samples collected during two research cruises aboard the R/V Jaywun, a collaboration between the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi and Khalifa University. The first expedition, in September 2024, retrieved sediment cores using a multiple corer; the second, in March 2025, collected 14 grab samples that were stained with rose Bengal to distinguish living from dead specimens. Planktonic foraminifera turned up at only four of the 20 sites, and even there they represented less than 5 percent of the total foraminiferal assemblage — but their presence at all, at water depths of 35 to 40 meters far from the open ocean, was unexpected.

The physical conditions at these sites are extreme by any standard. Conductivity-temperature-depth measurements during the August 2024 survey recorded water temperatures as high as 35.6 degrees Celsius, with values above 35 degrees throughout the upper water column for 200 kilometers offshore. Salinity in the basin south of the Great Pearl Bank ranged from 44 to 45 psu, among the highest values found anywhere in the open marine realm. Only further offshore, where the planktonic foraminifera were recovered, did surface salinity drop to around 39 psu, reflecting the influx of less-salty surface water from the central Gulf, which itself derives from the Indian Ocean inflow of roughly 37 psu entering through the Strait of Hormuz.

The assemblage the team recovered includes at least five taxa: three true planktonic species — Neogallitellia vivans, Globigerinoides tenellus, and Turborotalita cf. clarkei — plus Tretomphalus bulloides, a benthic species that develops a buoyant float chamber and spends part of its life drifting in the water column, and an enigmatic spherical microfossil of uncertain affinity, tentatively assigned to the genus Bachmayerella, a form first described from the Miocene of the Paratethys. Apart from N. vivans, all the planktonic species appeared only as single occurrences, with no more than three specimens of any one species found across the entire sample set. The stained samples confirmed that the planktonic shells in the sediment were dead specimens, not living individuals captured on the seafloor.

What makes the finding truly striking is the overwhelming dominance of N. vivans, a species first described in 1934 from the waters off Little Ki Island in Indonesia. The species is tiny — most specimens measure less than 120 micrometers across, meaning many slip through the standard 125-micrometer sieve that micropaleontologists traditionally use to sort foraminifera — and it is the only triserial planktonic foraminifer alive today, with its globular chambers arranged in three spiraling rows. Previous reports place it mainly in the Indo-Pacific, from the Laccadive Sea and the Banda Sea to the Yellow Sea and the Tsushima Strait. Its abundance in the Arabian Gulf suggests the species may be far more cosmopolitan than previously recognized, particularly in the small size fractions that earlier surveys often overlooked.

To understand why this species succeeds where others fail, the researchers turned to scanning electron microscopy, using both a desktop instrument and a high-resolution field-emission SEM to image broken specimens and reveal the internal structure of the shell. What they found was a wall of extraordinary simplicity: a thin, single calcitic layer only one to two micrometers thick, lacking a visible primary organic sheet, and perforated by micropores smaller than half a micrometer in diameter. These pores are sparsely and irregularly scattered across the surface, often occurring in pairs or triplets arranged in triangles, and are absent near the chamber sutures. The surface is smooth, without the pore mounds or pits that characterize many related genera.

These features may hold the key to the species’ ecological success. In foraminifera, pores function primarily for gas exchange, and pore size and density are known to correlate with ambient oxygen levels. N. vivans is frequently associated with nutrient-rich, low-oxygen environments such as upwelling zones and oxygen-minimum zones, including those of the Arabian Sea. Molecular studies have shown that the species diverged from a benthic ancestor, Stainforthia fusiformis, during the late early Miocene, around 18.2 million years ago — and that ancestor is famous for tolerating oxygen-poor sediments. The researchers suggest that N. vivans carried these adaptive traits with it when it made the evolutionary leap from the seafloor to the open water, equipping it to colonize marginal marine environments that exclude typical planktonic species.

The dominance of N. vivans in the hypersaline southeastern Gulf also echoes a pattern familiar from the deep fossil record. Minute triserial foraminifera related to this lineage famously bloomed in the aftermath of the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, thriving in the devastated oceans when virtually all other planktonic foraminifera perished. Species with this body plan appear to function as ecological opportunists — so-called disaster taxa — capable of occupying niches that more specialized organisms cannot tolerate. In the modern Gulf, a young basin flooded only during the early Holocene sea-level rise, N. vivans may be playing exactly that role, exploiting an environment that is naturally stressed by heat and salinity and increasingly pressured by human activity.

How the planktonic foraminifera arrived in the southeastern Gulf remains an open question. The researchers outline three possibilities: surface currents from the Indian Ocean may carry the organisms into the basin through the Strait of Hormuz; ballast water discharged by the region’s heavy commercial shipping may have introduced them; or a viable population may have established itself in the Gulf’s deepest sectors since the postglacial reflooding of the basin. The evidence currently available cannot settle the matter, and the authors call for future work using plankton nets, sediment traps, and Holocene sediment cores to determine whether N. vivans is an active, living member of the Gulf’s plankton community today or a recent immigrant whose shells are merely accumulating on the seafloor. Either way, the discovery stands as a vivid reminder that even in one of the harshest marine environments on Earth, life finds a way — sometimes in the smallest, most easily overlooked forms.

Subject of Research: First report of modern planktonic foraminifera and the morphology and ecology of Neogallitellia vivans in the hypersaline southeastern Arabian Gulf

Article Title: First report of modern planktonic foraminifera in the southeastern Arabian Gulf, with observations on the morphology and ecology of Neogallitellia vivans (Cushman)

Article References: Prayudi, S. D., Steuber, T., & Kaminski, M. A. (2026). First report of modern planktonic foraminifera in the southeastern Arabian Gulf, with observations on the morphology and ecology of Neogallitellia vivans (Cushman). Journal of Micropalaeontology, 45(1), 415-427. https://doi.org/10.5194/jm-45-415-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/jm-45-415-2026

Keywords: planktonic foraminifera, Neogallitellia vivans, Arabian Gulf, Abu Dhabi, hypersaline environment, micropaleontology, foraminiferal ecology, SEM imaging, Strait of Hormuz, disaster taxa, marine biodiversity, Holocene reflooding

The core problem the researchers set out to solve is one of resolution. Traditional emission inventories typically rely on coarse inputs: fleet averages, fuel sales statistics, and traffic models that spread pollution estimates across entire districts or cities. Such approaches struggle with the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of real traffic, where a congested intersection at rush hour can behave very differently from a free-flowing arterial road a few hundred meters away. Addressing that heterogeneity, the authors argue, requires scalable methodologies capable of resolving emissions at the level of individual vehicles and individual moments in time.

The framework begins with computer vision. The team trained a vehicle classification model on a dataset of 2.3 million images covering 4,923 distinct car models. That granularity matters because emissions are not uniform across a fleet: a heavy older sedan with a large combustion engine emits far more per kilometer than a modern compact hybrid, and knowing which vehicles are actually passing a camera transforms the quality of any downstream estimate. By classifying traffic at the level of make and model rather than broad category, the pipeline captures much of the variation that average-based inventories average away.

Classification alone, however, says little about how a vehicle is being driven at the moment it passes a camera. The second stage of the pipeline therefore tracks each detected vehicle across consecutive video frames and extracts its speed and acceleration. These kinematic variables are critical inputs for emission modeling, because the operating mode of an engine strongly influences its pollutant output. Cold starts, hard accelerations, idling in queues, and steady cruising all produce markedly different emission profiles for the same vehicle. By measuring driving behavior directly from video, the framework captures the dynamics of real traffic rather than assuming idealized driving cycles.

The extracted vehicle classes, speeds, and accelerations are then fed into a modified version of COPERT, a widely used European emission model that computes pollutant emissions from vehicle fleets based on vehicle characteristics and operating conditions. The researchers adapted the model so it could consume the vehicle-resolved, second-by-second information derived from video rather than the aggregated fleet and activity data it conventionally relies upon. The result is an emission estimate tied to specific vehicles on specific street segments at specific times, which is precisely the kind of granularity needed to identify pollution hotspots and evaluate targeted interventions.

To demonstrate the approach, the team applied it in two very different urban environments: Amsterdam and Abu Dhabi. The two cities differ in fleet composition, climate, street geometry, and traffic culture, making them a useful test of generality. In both settings, the framework proved effective for real-time traffic flow analysis, converting live camera feeds into continuously updated emission estimates. The authors present this as evidence that the method is not confined to a single urban context but has genuine potential for scalability across cities with widely varying characteristics.

The implications for urban policy could be substantial. Cities increasingly deploy networks of traffic cameras for congestion management and security, and this research suggests that the same infrastructure can double as a distributed environmental sensing network. A city that knows, street by street and hour by hour, which vehicle types are driving its emissions can design smarter low-emission zones, time its traffic signal strategies to reduce stop-and-go driving, and prioritize corridors for electrification or public transport investment. The authors emphasize that the framework provides a standardized approach to high-resolution emission monitoring, with implications for data-driven urban policy and environmental regulation worldwide.

The technical achievement rests on a demanding computational foundation. Processing street video at scale requires robust object detection and multi-object tracking under real-world conditions: occlusion, varying illumination, weather, and dense traffic all complicate the task of keeping a consistent identity attached to each vehicle across frames. The training corpus of 2.3 million images spanning nearly five thousand car models reflects the scale of data needed to make fine-grained classification reliable in the wild. The study also benefited from high-performance computing resources, including Tesla A100 GPU cluster nodes provided by the Information Technology Center at the University of Tokyo, underscoring the computational intensity of turning raw video into structured emission data.

The work also fits into a broader movement in urban science that treats the city itself as a laboratory instrument. The Senseable City Lab and its collaborators have long explored how ubiquitous digital infrastructure, from sensors to cameras to mobile network data, can render urban processes legible in new ways. This study extends that vision into the environmental domain, proposing that the visual data cities already collect can be repurposed to answer questions about air quality and public health that conventional monitoring stations answer only coarsely. Related efforts, such as digital twins for city traffic emissions built on deep vision and real-time monitoring, suggest a growing research frontier in which emission accounting becomes continuous rather than periodic.

Challenges remain before such systems become routine municipal tools. Camera coverage is uneven across and within cities, raising questions about how estimates generalize to unobserved streets. Privacy considerations around video analytics demand careful governance, even when the analytical output is anonymous emission data. And while the framework resolves vehicle type and driving dynamics, it does not by itself capture every factor influencing real-world emissions, such as temperature, maintenance state, or fuel quality, which emission models handle through their own parameterizations. Nonetheless, the Amsterdam and Abu Dhabi demonstrations mark a concrete step toward emission monitoring that is continuous, vehicle-resolved, and deployable on infrastructure cities already own. As electrification reshapes urban fleets, tools like this one will be essential for verifying that the transition is actually delivering cleaner air, street by street.

Subject of Research: Deep learning analysis of street video footage for vehicle-resolved urban emission estimation

Article Title: Estimating vehicular emissions by applying deep learning on video camera scenes

Article References: Kumar, A., Benson, T., Wang, A., Hu, S., Sekimoto, Y., Santi, P., Duarte, F., Zhu, X., Venverloo, T., & Ratti, C. (2026). Estimating vehicular emissions by applying deep learning on video camera scenes. Communications Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44172-026-00785-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44172-026-00785-3

Keywords: deep learning, vehicular emissions, computer vision, urban air pollution, COPERT model, traffic monitoring, vehicle classification, Amsterdam, Abu Dhabi, Senseable City Lab, emission inventory, smart cities

Sabkhas form under arid to hyper-arid climates where evaporation persistently exceeds rainfall and groundwater lies close enough to the surface for capillary rise to deliver moisture into the evaporation zone. The review distinguishes two dominant types in the UAE. Coastal sabkhas, exemplified by the Abu Dhabi shoreline, sit within supratidal to marginal intertidal zones and are sustained by episodic marine flooding, tidal pumping, lagoonal exchange and saline groundwater circulation. Inland sabkhas, such as the vast Sabkha Matti that extends roughly 150 kilometres from western Abu Dhabi into Saudi Arabia, occupy continental depressions and interdune corridors where groundwater discharge and intense evaporation dominate, with little direct marine input. Both settings share the same fundamental process chain: capillary ascent, evaporative concentration, evaporite crystallization and early cementation, yet their differing hydrologic connectivity produces distinct brine chemistries and mineral assemblages.

The geological setting of the UAE gives these systems unusual scientific richness. The Abu Dhabi coastal plain is an exceptionally low-gradient carbonate ramp where offshore shoals, barrier islands and restricted lagoons dampen wave energy and allow broad tidal flats to prograde seaward. Facies belts trace an orderly progression from subtidal carbonate shoals through lagoons and tidal channels into a shoreline-parallel belt of polygonal microbial mats and finally onto supratidal sabkha plains. Because these belts are preserved as vertically stacked Holocene packages, geologists can walk laterally across modern environments and read the same succession downward in cores. This direct process-to-product linkage is why the Abu Dhabi sabkhas became the type analogue for ancient carbonate–evaporite reservoir–seal systems across the Arabian Plate, including the Upper Jurassic Arab Formation.

The Mussafah Channel, a man-made canal cut through the coastal plain, has proven especially instructive. Its walls expose a well-constrained Holocene succession in which Pleistocene aeolian deposits are overlain by lagoonal and tidal-channel carbonates, microbial mat facies and supratidal sediments overprinted by evaporite mineralization. The stacking records a post-glacial marine transgression followed by regression and progressive sabkha development, providing a high-resolution template for reconstructing facies architecture and early diagenesis in subsurface reservoirs. Quantitative comparisons between modern surfaces and shallow subsurface successions have shown that many environmentally diagnostic structures, from microbial polygons to halite crust morphologies, retain recognizable signatures during early burial, strengthening confidence in facies-based analog applications.

One of the most celebrated contributions of the UAE sabkhas lies in addressing the long-standing Dolomite Problem: the puzzle of how abundant dolomite forms at low temperatures when laboratory experiments struggle to precipitate it. Cryo-scanning electron microscopy has revealed authigenic dolomite crystals nucleating within the extracellular polymeric substances of Abu Dhabi microbial mats, and laboratory studies with sulfate-reducing bacteria isolated from the sabkha have reproduced poorly ordered Ca-dolomite and very high-Mg calcite under simulated pore-water conditions. These findings establish microbial mats as geochemical micro-reactors that locally modify pH, alkalinity and magnesium-to-calcium ratios, demonstrating that low-temperature dolomitization in evaporitic settings is fundamentally microbially mediated rather than a simple consequence of evaporation.

The hydrogeochemistry of the coastal sabkha is equally counterintuitive. Water-budget and mass-balance analyses show that most water entering the shallow sabkha aquifer is meteoric, derived from infrequent but efficiently infiltrating rainfall, whereas more than 95 percent of the dissolved solutes ascend from continental brines in underlying Tertiary formations. This decoupling between water sources and solute sources explains why marine-like evaporite assemblages develop even where modern marine flooding is sporadic. The characteristic mineral sequence of carbonate, gypsum and anhydrite, then halite, reflects recurrent concentration–reset cycles driven by evaporation, flooding and brine–sediment interaction rather than a single linear evaporation path. Density contrasts between concentrated near-surface brines and dilute underlying groundwater even drive free convection, first documented at field scale in the Abu Dhabi aquifer, redistributing solutes and shaping cementation patterns.

The review also brings radiogeochemistry into the framework. Natural radioelement distributions prove strongly facies-dependent: potassium-40 and thorium-232 track detrital inputs of K-bearing silicates, clays and heavy minerals inherited from desert dunes and the ophiolite-dominated Hajar Mountains, while uranium behaves far more dynamically, migrating as uranyl–carbonate complexes in oxidizing alkaline brines and immobilizing in reducing microbial mat microenvironments. Radium, by contrast, can be trapped through substitution into the abundant gypsum and anhydrite that pervade sabkha soils, making sulfate horizons potential radiogeochemical sinks. The authors argue that robust environmental baselines therefore require sampling stratified by facies and depth rather than treating sabkhas as uniform salt flats.

On the question of critical elements, particularly lithium, the synthesis is deliberately cautious. Lithium remains in solution through early evaporation and concentrates mainly in late-stage, bittern-like residual brines enriched in magnesium, potassium, bromine and boron. Whether UAE sabkhas reach that stage depends on hydrologic restriction, residence time and flushing frequency, and the reviewers note that facies-resolved lithium datasets for UAE sabkhas are effectively absent from the open literature. Regional benchmarks, including lithium concentrations of roughly 0.2 to 0.3 milligrams per litre measured in Arabian Gulf desalination brines, and the persistent technical obstacle posed by high magnesium-to-lithium ratios in direct extraction technologies, all counsel against assuming inherent high-grade enrichment. The authors instead propose a staged screening strategy: vertical porewater profiling across representative facies, quantification of lithium alongside its chemical companions, seasonal repetition to capture evaporation and flooding cycles, and integration with techno-economic and environmental assessments before any resource claims are made.

Finally, the review elevates the sabkhas to geoheritage priorities. Abu Dhabi Sabkha is listed on UNESCO’s World Heritage Tentative List, recognized for the completeness of its roughly 7,000-year-old system, where subtidal lagoon muds, intertidal microbial mats and supratidal gypsum and anhydrite nodules co-occur within a single locality. Yet the scientific archive is disappearing fast: studies estimate that of about 150 kilometres of coastal sabkha present in the 1960s, only around 36 percent remained by the early 2010s, lost to industrial and urban encroachment. The reviewers call for protected reference zones, controlled access and integration of research with public interpretation, framing the sabkhas not as wasteland but as irreplaceable outdoor laboratories. From reservoir calibration and lithium screening to radon baselines and geotechnical risk in sulfate-cemented soils, they conclude, the fate of these reactive evaporitic systems now matters far beyond the shorelines of the southern Gulf.

Subject of Research: Integrated sedimentology, hydrogeochemistry, geomicrobiology and resource potential of UAE sabkha carbonate–evaporite systems

Article Title: Sabkha systems of the United Arab Emirates as integrated carbonate–evaporite laboratories: facies architecture, brine evolution, critical-element potential, and geoheritage significance

Article References: Abukhadra, M. R., Al-zharani, M., Allam, A. A., Hamdan, M. A., Szűcs, P., & Eid, M. H. (2026). Sabkha systems of the United Arab Emirates as integrated carbonate–evaporite laboratories: facies architecture, brine evolution, critical-element potential, and geoheritage significance. Environmental Earth Sciences, 85(16), Article 411. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-026-13146-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12665-026-13146-2

Keywords: sabkha, United Arab Emirates, evaporites, carbonate sedimentology, brine geochemistry, dolomite, microbial mats, lithium, radioactivity, Abu Dhabi, geoheritage, reservoir analogue