Linking Water Policy, Agriculture, and Predator Responses in Hyperarid Landscapes

Water management policies in desert agricultural regions critically influence both crop choices and ecosystem dynamics, yet their cascading ecological impacts remain poorly understood. In particular, the complex interactions between water quality, agricultural practices, and wildlife responses require further investigation to inform sustainable management in desert landscapes. Here, we evaluate how water policy, particularly seawater desalination initiatives influencing irrigation and cropping practices, shapes ecological systems in a hyperarid region, the southern Arava Valley of Israel. We integrated community-level questionnaires, agricultural records, animal field observations, and spatially explicit scenario tools into a mixed-methods framework to model social&ndash:ecological cascades linking water policy to predator dynamics. Bayesian Belief Networks combined with Generalized Linear Models of predator abundance were used to assess how improved water quality affects cropping patterns and, in turn, regional predator populations. Our findings indicate that desalination is unlikely to alter the predominance of date orchards or the high abundance of range-expanding jackals associated with these systems. However, water quality-driven expansion of field crops corresponds to lower modelled fox abundance and shifts in predicted predator interactions, while jackal populations remain largely influenced by date orchard availability. Under business-as-usual scenarios with lower water quality, farmers are likely to reduce field crop areas, corresponding to further changes in regional predator abundance. These findings suggest that water policy decisions may generate cascading social&ndash:ecological responses on both agricultural practices and local desert ecosystems, emphasizing the need for strategies that balance agricultural productivity with ecological sustainability in arid landscapes.