The study, conducted by Othman Abu Khurma of Emirates College for Advanced Education in Abu Dhabi, examined four motivational constructs drawn from the TIMSS student questionnaire: students’ confidence in science, digital self-efficacy, enjoyment of learning science, and the value students place on environmental preservation. Together, these variables were designed to capture complementary dimensions of expectancy-value theory, the influential psychological framework holding that students’ achievement-related behaviour is driven primarily by their expectations for success and the value they attach to learning tasks. Confidence in science represents an expectancy-related belief about one’s own competence, while enjoyment reflects intrinsic value, and environmental values tap perceived societal relevance.

The analytical sample comprised a weighted total of 34,842 fourth-graders from the UAE and 6,530 from Singapore, roughly 84 percent and 16 percent of the pooled dataset respectively, a distribution that mirrors the original TIMSS sampling design. The two countries were deliberately chosen as contrasting contexts: Singapore consistently ranks among the world’s top performers in international science assessments, while the UAE represents a rapidly reforming system investing heavily in digital learning platforms and curriculum modernisation. The comparison was not intended to rank the systems, the author stresses, but to test whether the same motivational constructs show similar predictive patterns in markedly different educational environments.

Methodologically, the study followed TIMSS technical guidelines by modelling each of the five plausible values for science achievement separately. Plausible values are draws from students’ estimated achievement distributions rather than simple observed test scores, and modelling all five reduces the risk that reported patterns are artefacts of a single estimate. Five supervised learning algorithms were then compared: linear regression, lasso regression, decision trees, random forests, and neural networks. Hyperparameters were tuned through cross-validation on the training data, and all analyses applied the student sampling weights provided by TIMSS to keep estimates representative of each national population.

The random forest emerged as the clear winner. It achieved a mean cross-validated R-squared of about 0.145 and a mean test R-squared of about 0.149, with a test root-mean-square error roughly 6.5 points lower than the linear models. The linear and lasso regressions explained only about 4 percent of out-of-sample variance, and the neural network added essentially nothing beyond the linear specification. The single decision tree told a cautionary tale: it fitted the training data closely, with a training R-squared of about 0.63, but produced negative out-of-sample R-squared values, a sign of severe overfitting in which the model reproduced noise rather than generalisable signal. Negative R-squared means the model predicted achievement less accurately than simply guessing the sample average.

That even the best model explained only about 15 percent of out-of-sample variance is itself a substantive finding. Roughly 85 percent of the variation in fourth-grade science achievement lies beyond what these four motivational variables can capture, underscoring the dominant role of factors the models could not include, from instructional quality to socioeconomic background. The author is explicit that this level of performance is insufficient for predicting individual students’ scores; the random forest serves a narrower descriptive purpose, revealing how the fitted model relates motivation to achievement and whether that relationship differs between countries. The consistency of performance across cross-validation, an independent test set, and all five plausible values suggests the model captured a reliable, if modest, signal.

Within that signal, science confidence dominated. Its average random-forest feature-importance value was 0.324, comfortably ahead of digital self-efficacy at 0.245, enjoyment of learning science at 0.226, and environmental values at 0.206. This ordering aligns with a substantial body of prior evidence, including meta-analyses, identifying confidence-related beliefs as among the strongest motivational correlates of science achievement. The zero-order correlation between science confidence and achievement was about 0.31 in the data, while digital self-efficacy correlated at roughly 0.22. Notably, Singaporean students scored significantly higher on achievement but reported slightly lower science confidence, whereas UAE students reported marginally higher enjoyment and digital self-efficacy, though these motivational differences carried small effect sizes.

To peer inside the random forest’s predictions, the study employed SHAP, or Shapley Additive exPlanations, a technique that decomposes a model’s output into additive contributions from each input variable. The SHAP interaction analysis revealed one striking cross-national difference: the contribution of enjoyment of learning science varied between the two countries, with the fitted model assigning larger positive contributions at high enjoyment levels in the UAE, while at moderate enjoyment levels Singaporean observations received somewhat larger contributions. The patterns for confidence, digital self-efficacy, and environmental values remained comparatively stable across the two samples. Given the model’s modest accuracy, the author treats these enjoyment differences as exploratory descriptions of model behaviour rather than evidence of established nonlinear effects or causal mechanisms, and the study explicitly does not identify the contextual factors, whether curriculum, pedagogy, or culture, that might underlie them.

The weakest predictor, environmental values, deserves careful interpretation rather than dismissal. TIMSS science achievement spans a broad range of content across life, physical, and Earth sciences, whereas pro-environmental attitudes are conceptually closer to environmental literacy constructs such as knowledge of ecosystems, climate change, and Earth resources. A child who champions school recycling programmes may express strong environmental values without that commitment registering on a general science test. The author suggests that environmental values may exert their strongest influence on domain-specific outcomes, and that future research should examine environmental knowledge subscales directly rather than broad composite scores.

The study also carries candid limitations that shape how its findings should be read. The analysed data file contained no socioeconomic, home-resource, parental-education, or school-level indicators, and TIMSS, being cross-sectional, records no measure of prior achievement, so the reported associations are unadjusted for potential common causes of both motivation and achievement. Part of the predictive signal attributed to motivational variables may therefore reflect background characteristics with which they share variance. Reciprocal relationships are also plausible, since high achievement can itself build confidence. Still, the work extends machine-learning research on large-scale assessments, which has concentrated largely on older students, into the early grades, a period when attitudes toward science form and often begin to decline. Its headline message is measured but clear: if educators want to understand which feelings matter most for young children’s science performance, belief in one’s own capability outranks pleasure in the subject, though motivation remains only one thread in a much larger tapestry of influences on how children learn science.

Subject of Research: Affective-motivational predictors of Grade 4 science achievement in TIMSS 2023 data from the UAE and Singapore using explainable machine learning

Article Title: Confidence over enjoyment? A cross-national explainable machine learning analysis of affective predictors of early science achievement

Article References: Confidence over enjoyment? A cross-national explainable machine learning analysis of affective predictors of early science achievement. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40536-026-00325-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40536-026-00325-7

Keywords: TIMSS 2023, science achievement, machine learning, SHAP, self-efficacy, science confidence, motivation, primary education, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, random forest, expectancy-value theory

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

The Quaternary period, spanning roughly the last 2.6 million years, is a peculiar corner of Earth history. It accounts for only about 0.057 percent of the planet’s timeline, yet it supplies 17 percent of all World Heritage Sites characterised by geological features, from the karstic lakes of Plitvice in Croatia to the Lut Desert in Iran and the volcanoes of Hawaii. These are landscapes shaped by ice ages, shifting dunes, rising and falling seas, and the simultaneous unfolding of human evolution. In southeast Arabia, Quaternary deposits cover around 44 percent of the land surface, including aeolian dunes that dominate 57 percent of that area, alongside alluvial fans, fluvial channels, sabkha salt flats, caves and the remains of ancient palaeolakes. Because the region is arid and sparsely vegetated, these features are strikingly visible, unlike in humid landscapes where vegetation often hides them.

That visibility matters, because these sites are disappearing. A recent inventory of Quaternary palaeoenvironmental sites in the region found that 31 of 234 documented sites, about 13 percent, had already been destroyed, largely by urban development and quarrying, with another 34 sites classified as endangered. The Abu Dhabi Sabkha, a landscape of unique scientific value, has seen more than 60 percent of its area damaged by petroleum and civil engineering activity. Yet public appreciation of geoheritage lags far behind that of other sciences. On social media, the hashtag geology is used roughly 80 percent less often than physics, biology or chemistry, and television coverage of the geosciences tends to cluster around palaeontology, volcanoes and earthquakes.

To test whether cultural storytelling could close that gap, the team ran a three-phase study between November 2022 and January 2024. In the first phase, focus groups of academics, museum professionals and heritage administrators met at Buhais Geology Park in the UAE and the Oman National Museum. Their advice was concrete: begin with visually engaging footage of familiar places, build from general overviews to technical detail, incorporate archaeological, cultural and religious narratives where appropriate, keep the tone conversational and locally grounded, and frame geoheritage in terms of everyday values such as beauty, cultural relevance and conservation.

The second phase turned those recommendations into two videos, each just under nine minutes, the upper end of the six-to-nine-minute window that research on educational video suggests sustains attention best. The geocultural video devoted about 140 seconds, roughly 26 percent of its runtime, to cultural content, connecting dunes, caves, palaeolakes and sabkhas to the archaeology and heritage of early human settlement in Arabia. The control video replaced that material with additional Quaternary science. Both featured English narration, dialogues with local experts in Arabic, and subtitles, and both were piloted with focus group participants to check scientific accuracy and cultural representation.

The third phase was a randomised online experiment. Participants, all residents of the UAE or Oman, completed questionnaires before watching, immediately after, and three months later. Of 160 initial respondents, 104 completed the second wave and 82 completed all three, a drop-out rate within or better than the expected range for longitudinal studies. The sample skewed young, highly educated and environmentally engaged, with strong pro-conservation baselines: participants rated the importance of protecting natural heritage at 9.2 out of 10 before watching anything. Forty-eight participants were classified as domain specialists, geoscience students or professionals, and 56 as non-specialists. Even among specialists, only half could correctly identify Quaternary geoheritage sites at the outset.

The results, analysed with difference-in-differences models that isolate the effect of the cultural framing, revealed a nuanced trade-off. Immediately after watching, the science-focused video produced stronger gains on the objective knowledge test, a pattern driven entirely by specialist viewers. But that advantage evaporated by the three-month follow-up, when the two groups performed almost identically, with the geocultural group slightly ahead despite starting lower. Meanwhile, the geocultural video showed a clear and statistically significant advantage in sustaining interest in the relationship between Quaternary geology and archaeology, particularly among non-specialists, whose interest remained elevated at follow-up while the control group’s declined. Self-reported knowledge of that geocultural relationship stayed significantly above baseline in both groups three months on.

The most striking finding concerned conservation attitudes. Both videos increased viewers’ sense that Quaternary sites deserve protection, but the gains were consistently stronger and more durable in the geocultural group, an effect most pronounced among non-specialists, who started from lower baselines and therefore had more room to move. Qualitative feedback reinforced the pattern: geoheritage protection was the most frequently cited takeaway among treatment-group viewers, who also tolerated the video’s length better and asked for more content rather than less. Roughly half of participants in each group reported watching the video more than twice, and 91 percent of all respondents said their interest in Quaternary geoheritage had increased.

The authors are careful about the limits of their evidence. With 82 complete cases, the study is underpowered to detect small effects, and many estimates carry wide confidence intervals. The sample cannot represent the region’s 14.1 million residents, being dominated by university students and adults with pre-existing pro-nature views. Still, the pattern echoes earlier work, such as a study in St. Vincent where a video game taught volcanic hazards slightly less effectively than a traditional lecture but engaged learners more deeply. The parallel suggests a general principle: adding narrative or cultural framing may dilute short-term factual delivery while buying something more valuable, namely attention that lasts.

The practical implication is that communicators should match the framing to the goal. If the aim is immediate factual learning, a focused, technical presentation may win. If the aim is to make ancient landscapes feel relevant, memorable and worth defending, human stories appear to be the stronger tool. For Quaternary science, a field whose subject matter, deep time, is notoriously hard for non-specialists to grasp, the cultural bridge may be exactly what turns abstract geology into a cause people care about, three months later and beyond.

Subject of Research: Testing whether geocultural context in educational videos improves public communication of Quaternary geoheritage in southeast Arabia

Article Title: Including cultural context improves communication outcomes for quaternary geoheritage: evidence from southeast Arabia

Article References: Including cultural context improves communication outcomes for quaternary geoheritage: evidence from southeast Arabia. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-291-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-291-2026

Keywords: geoheritage, Quaternary science, science communication, geocultural context, Oman, United Arab Emirates, educational video, conservation attitudes, archaeology, geotourism, public engagement, difference-in-differences

The research, led by Rabin Chakrabortty of the American University of Sharjah together with colleagues across several departments, applied the InVEST Urban Stormwater Retention model, an open-source tool developed by the Natural Capital Project at Stanford University. Unlike conventional event-based hydrologic models such as SWMM or HEC-HMS, which simulate the response of a drainage network to a single storm, InVEST operates on an annual climatological timescale. This makes it particularly suited to strategic planning questions: how much water does a city’s landscape soak up over a full year, how much pollution does that absorption prevent from reaching the sea, and what would it cost to reproduce those services artificially?

To answer those questions, the team assembled a remarkably detailed digital portrait of the emirate. A land use and land cover map was derived from Sentinel-2 satellite imagery at 10-meter resolution and classified into seven categories, ranging from high-intensity developed zones to cultivated land, grassland, scrub and shrub, bare land, and open water. Annual rainfall came from the CHIRPS gridded climate dataset, resampled to match the satellite grid. Hydrologic soil groups were compiled from the FAO Soil Map, ISRIC SoilGrids, and the UAE Soil Survey, then reclassified into the standard USDA categories A through D according to texture and permeability. Road centerlines from OpenStreetMap were rasterized to capture the hydrologic connectivity of impervious surfaces, and all layers were clipped to the Sharjah Municipality boundary and projected into UTM Zone 40N.

The model’s core logic is elegantly simple. For every 10-meter pixel, annual precipitation is partitioned according to a runoff coefficient and a percolation ratio assigned to each land cover class. The retention ratio is the implicit complement of these fluxes, representing the fraction of rainfall captured through interception, infiltration into soil, and eventual return to the atmosphere via evapotranspiration. Crucially, the model also accounts for urban drainage connectivity: pixels flagged as directly connected impervious areas, such as high-intensity development and surfaces within 50 meters of roads, were assigned high runoff coefficients and negligible retention, because stormwater there is rapidly whisked into storm drains rather than absorbed locally. This 50-meter retention radius was chosen as representative of parcel-scale drainage distances in Sharjah’s urban fabric.

The results reveal a striking spatial divide. Across the emirate, the mean retention ratio was 0.81, translating into a total retention volume of 122.77 million cubic meters per year. Runoff, by contrast, averaged a ratio of 0.19, corresponding to 31.29 million cubic meters annually, concentrated in densely built-up districts and along major transport corridors. A separate percolation calculation estimated potential groundwater recharge at just over 5 percent of annual precipitation, or 7.97 million cubic meters per year, a modest fraction that nonetheless carries real significance in a region where aquifers are stressed by over-extraction and saline intrusion from the Arabian Gulf. The authors emphasize that this recharge represents a component of the retained water rather than an additional fraction of the water balance.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns which land covers deliver these services. Cultivated land contributed approximately 35 percent of total citywide retention, grassland about 25 percent, and scrub and shrub a further 20 percent, meaning that vegetated and semi-natural classes together supplied roughly 80 percent of the retained volume, far out of proportion to their share of the map. Bare land accounted for around 10 percent, while high-intensity developed areas contributed a mere 5 percent, and open water was essentially negligible. In other words, the emirate’s remaining green and agricultural patches are doing the overwhelming majority of the hydrologic work, a pattern consistent with prior studies in Doha, Qatar, where researchers documented a 422 percent increase in stormwater runoff between 1984 and 2020 as urban expansion replaced natural land with impervious surfaces.

The water quality implications follow directly from the hydrology. Because no local stormwater monitoring data were available, the team adopted screening-level event mean concentrations from peer-reviewed arid-region studies: 2.0 milligrams per liter for total nitrogen and 0.4 milligrams per liter for total phosphorus. Applying these values to the modeled volumes, the researchers estimated that annual runoff exports roughly 62,580 kilograms of nitrogen and 12,516 kilograms of phosphorus toward receiving waters, while the retention process avoids nearly four times as much, approximately 245,536 kilograms of nitrogen and 49,107 kilograms of phosphorus per year. In a coastal emirate where stormwater is often discharged untreated into the Arabian Gulf, these avoided loads represent a meaningful, if screening-level, indication of how green infrastructure could reduce nutrient enrichment and eutrophication risk in sensitive marine waters.

To translate these biophysical services into economic terms, the study applied a replacement cost method, multiplying the modeled retention volume by an assumed benchmark of 1,800 UAE dirhams per cubic meter of engineered stormwater storage. The authors are careful to stress that the resulting figure is an illustrative, order-of-magnitude capital-equivalent benchmark rather than an annual benefit estimate or a formal benefit-cost analysis, and that it is sensitive to the assumed unit cost. Even so, the calculation makes the central point vivid: reproducing the retention capacity that Sharjah’s landscape currently provides for free, using detention basins, underground storage tanks, and pumping facilities alone, would require capital investment on a scale that dwarfs typical municipal stormwater budgets. The implicit message for planners is that every hectare of farmland or green space paved over is infrastructure quietly decommissioned.

The study is candid about its limitations. The annual time step of the InVEST model cannot capture the flash floods and first-flush pollutant pulses that dominate flood risk in hyper-arid climates, where rainfall arrives in short, violent winter storms between December and March; complementary event-based modeling would be needed for detailed flood design. The nutrient estimates rest on assumed uniform concentrations rather than locally calibrated measurements, and the soil group reclassification reflects generalized infiltration potential rather than site-specific hydraulic testing. The economic valuation, moreover, was aggregated rather than spatially explicit, limiting its use in pinpointing conservation hotspots. The authors call for local soil infiltration measurements, stormwater quality monitoring campaigns, sensitivity analyses, and scenario-based studies of land-use change and climate variability to sharpen the picture.

Even with those caveats, the work stands as one of the first integrated, city-scale assessments of stormwater retention, nutrient load reduction, and economic valuation in a hyper-arid Gulf city, and its framework is deliberately replicable. Built entirely on openly available datasets, Sentinel-2 imagery, CHIRPS rainfall, OpenStreetMap roads, and public soil maps, and executed with a standardized open-source modeling platform, the approach could be transferred to other rapidly growing dryland cities across the Gulf, North Africa, and beyond. As climate change renders extreme precipitation more intense and erratic even in arid zones, and as recent flooding episodes in Sharjah and Dubai have exposed the limits of engineered drainage, the study offers a quantitative argument that the cheapest and most versatile stormwater infrastructure a desert city possesses may already be growing out of the ground. Protecting it, the authors conclude, is not merely an environmental nicety but an economically justified pillar of water security and climate resilience.

Subject of Research: Nature-based stormwater retention and water quality assessment using the InVEST model in the arid city of Sharjah, UAE

Article Title: Nature based stormwater management for annual retention and water quality in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates: an InVEST assessment

Article References: Chakrabortty, R., Ali, T., Abouleish, M., Atabay, S., Ahmad, N., Abu-Rukba, R., & Meraj, G. (2026). Nature based stormwater management for annual retention and water quality in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates: an InVEST assessment. Discover Geoscience, 4(1), Article 323. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44288-026-00620-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44288-026-00620-4

Keywords: stormwater retention, nature-based solutions, InVEST model, ecosystem services, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, water quality, groundwater recharge, urban hydrology, green infrastructure, arid cities, Sentinel-2

The research, led by Doreen Mukona of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth together with colleagues at Ajman University, the University of Zimbabwe, and the University of Global Health Equity in Kigali, took place at a tertiary health sciences college in the United Arab Emirates. The team designed a concurrent, equal-status mixed-methods study, meaning that quantitative survey data and qualitative free-text responses were collected at the same time and given equal analytical weight. A total of 133 nursing students in academic years two through four participated. The quantitative arm used an adapted 31-item Pressure Injury Prevention Knowledge questionnaire, derived from the internationally recognized Pressure Ulcer Knowledge Assessment Tool, while two open-ended questions invited students to describe the barriers they perceived and the improvements they would suggest.

The headline finding is sobering. On average, students scored 19.9 out of 31 points, equivalent to 64.1 percent, with a standard deviation of 16.6 percent. Only 20.3 percent of participants reached the pre-specified threshold for good knowledge of 80 percent or higher. A further 42.1 percent fell into the moderate band of 60 to 79 percent, while 37.6 percent scored below 60 percent, classed as poor. In other words, nearly four in ten future nurses at this institution had knowledge levels that fell short of what most educators would consider safe for independent clinical practice. The participants, who had a mean age of 21.9 years and were almost entirely Emirati nationals at 99.2 percent, represent the demographic that will staff the country’s expanding hospital network in the coming years.

One of the most technically revealing results concerns how students performed on different types of test items. The questionnaire included both true-keyed items, where the correct answer affirms a correct practice, and false-keyed items, where the correct answer requires students to reject a plausible but wrong statement. Students scored a striking 79.7 percent correct on true-keyed items but only 40.5 percent on false-keyed ones, a difference that was highly statistically significant with a paired t-value of 18.96 and p less than 0.001, corresponding to a very large effect size with Cohen’s d of 1.65. This pattern suggests that students can recognize correct prevention practices when they see them but struggle to identify incorrect ones, a cognitive profile consistent with surface learning rather than the deep conceptual understanding needed to make sound clinical judgments in ambiguous real-world situations.

The researchers also explored whether knowledge grew with experience. Knowledge was weakly but significantly associated with year of study, with Spearman correlation coefficients between 0.23 and 0.25 and p values below 0.01, and with the number of clinical placements completed, at rho equal to 0.22 and p equal to 0.01. However, when the team built an adjusted multivariable linear regression model, no individual predictor remained statistically significant, and the model explained only seven percent of the variance in knowledge scores, with p equal to 0.09. This weak explanatory power is itself informative: it implies that academic seniority alone does not reliably produce pressure injury expertise, and that other factors, such as teaching quality, curriculum emphasis, and individual study habits, likely play larger roles than the researchers could capture with the variables available.

The qualitative arm of the study painted a vivid picture of why knowledge fails to translate into action. Using qualitative content analysis, the researchers identified six categories of barriers. The most frequently cited was a poor training-practice linkage, reported by 54 percent of students, meaning that what they learned in lectures did not match what they encountered or were allowed to do during clinical placements. Lack of time followed closely at 51 percent, reflecting the relentless pace of hospital wards where prevention tasks such as repositioning patients every two hours compete with medications, documentation, and emergencies. Workforce-capacity constraints were cited by 43 percent of respondents, pointing to understaffing that leaves too few hands to turn and reposition immobile patients as often as guidelines demand.

The remaining barriers, though less frequently mentioned, are no less important. Lack of equipment was reported by 26 percent of students, a reminder that even well-trained nurses cannot deliver prevention without pressure-redistributing mattresses, cushions, and adequate dressing supplies. Communication or documentation breakdowns accounted for 13 percent of responses, highlighting how prevention depends on seamless handovers and accurate skin assessments recorded across shifts. Finally, patient-related complexity, cited by 12 percent, acknowledged that some patients present challenges, such as restlessness, obesity, or medical instability, that make standard prevention protocols difficult to follow. Together, these six categories describe a system problem rather than an individual failing: students may know exactly what to do, yet find themselves embedded in clinical environments that do not support doing it.

When asked how nursing education could be improved, the students were remarkably consistent. Regular training was the most popular suggestion at 58.9 percent, followed by simulation-based learning at 35.7 percent and updated guidelines at 22.3 percent. Simulation deserves particular attention from educators and policymakers alike. High-fidelity manikins and scenario-based exercises allow students to practice skin assessments, risk scoring with tools such as the Braden Scale, and repositioning techniques in a safe environment where mistakes carry no human cost. The strong student demand for simulation echoes a broader international movement in nursing education toward experiential learning, and the findings suggest that in the UAE context this shift has not yet gone far enough to close the theory-practice gap that students themselves identified as the leading barrier.

The study’s methodology merits confidence as well as scrutiny. The authors followed the STROBE reporting guidelines for observational studies and the SRQR standards for qualitative research, and they used Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 to assess the internal consistency of the adapted questionnaire. Ethical approval was granted by the Fatima College of Health Sciences Research Ethics Committee, and the study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with electronic informed consent and voluntary participation. The authors transparently disclose that the first author held a teaching role at the participating institution, a potential influence on both student disclosures and data interpretation, and they describe coding safeguards used to mitigate this. The study was not prospectively registered and received no external funding, details that readers should weigh when interpreting the results.

What, then, should change? The findings point to a coordinated agenda. Nursing curricula in the UAE and similar settings should place greater emphasis on false-keyed reasoning, teaching students not just what correct prevention looks like but how to spot and correct unsafe practice. Clinical placements need structured, supervised opportunities to perform actual prevention tasks rather than merely observe them. Hospitals and colleges should jointly invest in simulation laboratories, ensure equipment availability, and address the workforce and time constraints that students identified so clearly. Pressure injuries cost health systems enormously in prolonged stays, infections, and litigation, and they inflict real suffering on vulnerable patients. If nearly 80 percent of graduating nurses fall short of good knowledge, and if even knowledgeable students are blocked by systemic barriers, then the solution must span the classroom, the simulation suite, and the ward floor simultaneously. This study provides the regional evidence base to start that conversation.

Subject of Research: Nursing students' knowledge of pressure injury prevention and barriers to applying it in the United Arab Emirates

Article Title: Knowledge of pressure injury prevention and perceived barriers to applying it among nursing students at a tertiary institution in the United Arab Emirates: a mixed-methods study

Article References: Mukona, D., Mukona, R. F., Zvinavashe, M., & Ndaimani, A. (2026). Knowledge of pressure injury prevention and perceived barriers to applying it among nursing students at a tertiary institution in the United Arab Emirates: a mixed-methods study. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10537-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10537-8

Keywords: pressure injuries, pressure ulcers, nursing education, nursing students, knowledge assessment, mixed methods, theory-practice gap, simulation training, clinical placements, United Arab Emirates, wound care, patient safety

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