Saddam Hussein drained more than 92 percent of a marsh larger than the Florida Everglades, devastating wildlife and displacing the 6,000-year-old culture of the Ma’dan or Marsh Arabs from southern Iraq, said a prominent international scholar who will visit Ames on Thursday.

“The marshes were intentionally drained by Saddam, but now they are in the process of being restored,” said Hamid Ahmed, a marine biologist and Iraqi expatriate.

Ahmed will speak about his and others’ efforts to repair the ecological, cultural and economic devastation Saddam wrought on the Iraqi marshlands in his lecture, “Restoring the Mesopotamian Marshes and the Prospects for Renewal in Southern Iraq” at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Farwell T. Brown Auditorium at the Ames Public Library, 515 Douglas Ave.

Ahmed called Saddam’s draining of the marshes an act of ecocide and genocide.

Research needs to be done to find the best way to restore the marshlands, Ahmed said. Some Iraqis have even taken restoration into their own hands and tried to destroy the dams that block the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to the marshes, he said.

“We are happy the people want the marshes back, but we need to make sure the water reaching the marshes is not contaminated with something that will end up killing what we are trying to save,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed said two weeks before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, he left for Britain to embark on a research program. He is now a learning consultant at Halton College in Widnes, England and a visiting professor at the Marine Science Center at Basrah University in Basrah, Iraq. He was asked to be a visiting professor by Basrah University in recognition of his involvement with many national and international organizations and academic institutions that are helping to restore Iraqi universities nearly destroyed by war and looting.

The lecture is sponsored by the College of Agriculture’s Global Agriculture Program and the entomology and natural resource ecology and management departments. It is also sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ political science and ecology, evolution and organismal biology departments, as well as the ISU International Studies Program, the ISU Iraq Initiative Group and Human Service International USA.