The impact of remediating oil-contaminated areas on faunal diversity in the State of Kuwait

The declining vegetation cover due to extreme hot weather and man-made disturbances such as human activities and oil spill contamination during military activities has made it of crucial importance to restore and conserve the biodiversity in Kuwait’s terrestrial ecosystems. In recent years, Kuwait has undertaken projects to revegetate natural areas/habitats which were severely degraded. In this study, attempts were made to assess the wildlife population and their diversity in some selected areas of South Kuwait which were contaminated but remediated and also revegetated and compared them with control sites which were devoid of any vegetation. Pitfall trapping, mammal trap line, fixed point technique, visual encounter survey and infra-red camera trapping techniques were used to collect wildlife data for this study. Results indicate that during the winter of 2024, species richness and Shannon’s diversity index was higher in the effluent pit plots compared to the reference (100% positive control) and control plots. However, evenness was highest in the control plots. During summer of the same year, similar results were observed but evenness was highest in the reference plots. During winter, among the wildlife populations observed, 80% of them were insects, 10% mammals, 5% reptiles and 2.5% each of arachnids and birds. During summer, no bird species were observed. Total count of the observed species was significantly higher in remediated sites than the control sites especially the ants and beetles. Cluster and multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis yielded with a stress value of 0.077 and a clear separation into three distinct clusters (C2, C1 and C1’). Species within the same cluster exhibited higher similarity, indicating their ecological niche performing similar ecological functions and provide closely related ecosystem services. The C2 cluster had in common species with the C1 and C1’ clusters while C1 and C1’ had no species in common between them. Taken together, the results of this study indicates that remediated plots are demonstrating positive incremental changes in supporting the diversity of insects and arachnids but mammal and reptile diversity are yet to flourish in all studied habitats.