MohammadTalafha

Azraq Wetland Reserve, Zarqa

The Wetland Seen From Space: What Greenness Means at Qa al-Azraq

A research-led reading of vegetation recovery at Qa al-Azraq in Jordan. Satellite analysis documented a major expansion of vegetation between 2015 and 2025, while bird monitoring, groundwater evidence, and the artificial pumping that sustains part of the wetland reveal a more complicated ecological story. The article asks not only what remote sensing can show about recovery, but what kind of water future can sustain Azraq without reproducing pressure on its depleted aquifer.

Wadi Araba Sub-District, Aqaba

Under the Acacia Crown: Trees of Wadi Araba

An ecological reading of the native acacias of Wadi Araba, Jordan, exploring their relationship with water, landform, soil, shade, and other species. Rather than treating the trees as isolated botanical objects, the article looks at the small ecological worlds that form beneath and around their crowns.

A Dead Tree Is Still Habitat

A short ecological reading of deadwood as habitat rather than waste. Standing snags, fallen trunks, cavities, bark, fungi, decaying heartwood, and contact with soil create a changing sequence of habitats used by organisms at different stages of decomposition. The article invites a slower way of looking at dead trees, not as empty remains, but as structures still participating in biodiversity, nutrient cycling, carbon dynamics, and forest renewal.

Mapping Sanitation Vulnerability in Jordan

This research developed a GIS-based Sanitation Hotspot Index for Jordan to identify districts and neighborhoods with the greatest need for sanitation intervention. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process, expert and stakeholder input, and multiple spatial datasets, the study combined ten criteria into a national vulnerability model. The resulting maps were designed to support sanitation planning, funding allocation, donor prioritization, and infrastructure investment.

Constructed Wetlands: When Wastewater Treatment Becomes Landscape

A Field Guide to constructed wetlands as nature-based wastewater infrastructure. It explains how engineered wetland systems treat wastewater through physical, biological, and chemical processes while offering opportunities for low-energy operation, decentralized treatment, water reuse, biodiversity enhancement, landscape integration, and circular resource management. It also examines their limitations, including land requirements, pretreatment, clogging, maintenance, and the need to match treatment performance with intended reuse.

Planning Happens in Kitchens

A reflection on everyday planning through the experience of intermittent water supply in Jordan. The article argues that households do more than cope with scarcity: they forecast, prioritize, coordinate, adapt, reuse, and learn. Drawing on insurgent planning, counter-conduct, democratic planning, and the changing role of the planner, it asks whether planning should focus less on inviting citizens into formal processes and more on recognizing the planning practices citizens have already created.

The Cistern as a Planning Unit

A field guide to reading rainwater cisterns as distributed water infrastructure rather than isolated tanks. It follows water from catchment to conveyance, storage, use, overflow, and maintenance, and shows how planners can map these relationships across buildings, sites, and neighborhoods.

Reading Ancient Water Systems as Landscape Infrastructure

A field guide to reading ancient water systems as complete landscape infrastructures rather than isolated monuments. It offers a method for tracing water from source to use, distinguishing capture from conveyance and storage, recognizing the role of topography and maintenance, using GIS carefully, and interpreting surviving remains without overstating their original function.