1 · Position
Al Maha Desert Resort was established in 1999 with a 27-square-kilometre conservation reserve of its own: seventy Arabian oryx reintroduced, six thousand indigenous trees and shrubs planted. Its managers then ran an environmental audit of the surrounding desert, and submitted a proposal to the government for a formal national park. The proposal was accepted, the Dubai Conservation Board was constituted, and the DDCR was created at 225 square kilometres — 4.7 per cent of the emirate’s land. Forty-one oryx were translocated from Al Maha into the new reserve’s north.
2 · Why it is in the Library
Every other body in this group was created by a house to look after the land the house already sat on. This one is the reverse in scale: a resort’s conservation programme became the template for a state reserve nine times its size, drafted by the hotel’s own management and adopted by government. The Library admits on authorship, and a hotel that wrote a national park into existence is the strongest instance of it in the group.
3 · Where it sits
It is filed in Part X rather than Capital because Al Maha made it. The DDCR now sits above the resort in area and in authority — three weather stations, camera traps, a georeferenced database — but the direction of authorship is settled by who created whom, and here the house came first.
4 · Candour
Oryx and gazelle numbers are the reserve’s own. A protected area created out of a resort’s conservation zone, and adjacent to the resort that proposed it, carries the obvious question of whose interest the boundaries serve; the arrangement does not answer it. The largest free-roaming herd in the UAE is a herd within a fenced reserve, and the phrase should be read that way.