Open Access

Christian Rumbaur, Niels Thevs, Markus Disse, Michael Ahlheim, Andreas Brieden, Bernd Cyffka, Reiner Doluschitz, Doris Düthmann, Til Feike, Oliver Frör, Philipp Gärtner, Ümüt Halik, Joachim Hill, Marie Hinnenthal, Patrick Keilholz, Birgit Kleinschmit, Valentina Krysanova, Martin Kuba, Sebastian Mader, Christoph Menz, Hussein Othmanli, Sonna Pelz, Matthias Schroeder, Tuck Fatt Siew, Vivien Stender, Karl Stahr, Frank M. Thomas, Martin Welp, Michel Wortmann, Xiaoning Zhao, Xi Chen, Tong Jiang, Chengyi Zhao, Xi Zhang, Jing Luo, Hamid Yimit, Ruide Yu

• The Tarim River Basin, located in Xinjiang, NW China, is the largest endorheic river basin of China and one of the largest in whole Central Asia. Due to the extremely arid climate with an annual precipitation of less than 100 mm, the water supply along the Aksu and Tarim River solely depends on river water. This applies for anthropogenic activities (e.g. agriculture) as well as for the natural ecosystems so that both compete for water. The on-going increase of water consumption by agriculture and other human activities in this region has been enhancing the competition for water between human needs and nature. Against this background, 11 German and 6 Chinese universities and research institutes formed the consortium SuMaRiO (www.sumario.de), which aims at gaining a holistic picture of the availability of water resources in the Tarim River Basin and the impacts on anthropogenic activities and natural ecosystems caused by the water distribution within the Tarim River Basin. The discharge of the Aksu River, which is the major tributary to the Tarim, has been increasing over the past 6 decades due to enhanced glacier melt. Alone from 1989 to 2011, the area under agriculture more than doubled. Thereby, cotton became the major crop and there was a shift from small-scale farming to large-scale intensive farming. The major natural ecosystems along the Aksu and Tarim River are riparian ecosystems: Riparian (Tugai) forests, shrub vegetation, reed beds, and other grassland. Within the SuMaRiO Cluster the focus was laid on the Tugai forests, with Populus euphratica as dominant tree, because the most productive and species-rich natural ecosystems can be found among those forests. On sites with groundwater distance of less than 7.5 m the annual increments correlated with river runoffs of the previous year. But, the further downstream along the Tarim River, the more the natural river dynamics ceased, which impacts on the recruitment of Populus euphratica. Household surveys revealed that there is a considerable willingness to pay for conservation of those riparian forests with the mitigation of dust and sandstorms considered as the most important ecosystem service. This interdisciplinary project will result in a decision support tool (DST), build on the participation of regional stakeholders and models based on results and field experiments. This DST finally shall assist stakeholders in balancing the water competition acknowledging the major external effects of any water allocation.