The Mesopotamian marshes are important for economic, social, and biodiversity values and have been home to indigenous human communities for millennia. They are regarded as a legendary site. This multiauthored book contains chapters written by worldrenowned experts in their field. Both basic and applied information are made available, making the book a musthave for a wide spectrum of users. For example, an understanding of the natural and the social aspects of the marshes, as described here, is an obvious prerequisite for a pest management plan in this area. Scholars interested in wetlands can use this book as a guide to compare different wetlands areas in Asia. The bibliography section contains valuable references to the marsh areas and research in the field. This book serves as an up-to-date comprehensive source of information on different aspects of the southern marshes of Iraq and is aimed at academic scholars, environmentalists, and decision makers.

Laith A. Jawad obtained a degree (MSc) in fish taxonomy from the Zoology Department, University of Bristol, UK, in 1980. He continued as fish taxonomist at Basrah University, Iraq, where he worked for more than 20 years before he immigrated to New Zealand in 1997. During this time, he started the biochemical taxonomy of fishes of Iraq and published over 400 scientific papers and book reviews in leading scientific journals. He is the author and co-author of several textbooks in biology published in Arabic. Recently, he contributed five chapters to a book about coastal fishes, Coastal Fishes: Habitat, Behavior and Conservation, published by Nova Publishers, Canada. And authored a book about Dangerous Fishes of the Eastern and Southern Arabian Peninsula published by Springer in 2017. He served as fish biodiversity expert and consultant at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Oman for the period 2008-2012 during which he co-authored two papers describing a new fish species from the Omani waters and reported over 80 fish species as a new record to the Omani waters. He authored a guide to the fishes of the southern coasts of Oman published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Oman in 2018. He also published over 90 papers on fish fauna of Oman, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. In 2013, he broadened his scientific contact and started to collaborate with over 60 scientists from more than 50 countries around the world in researches dealing with different aspects of fish taxonomy and ichthyology.