[Level Up] [Doc Top] [Doc End] [Next Item] [Home Page]
Soils information from the Murray Darling Basin looks set to join the information super-highway, a move likely to protect our rural exports as well as the water system in eastern and southern Australia.
That's according to Dr Colin Chartres, Program Manager in CSIRO Soils, who spoke this week to a Dryland Research forum convened by the Murray Darling Basin Commission at Albury.
Dr Chartres said that when soil information on the vital Murray Darling Basin was collated onto a high-tech information system, it had the potential to be fed onto the Internet and be accessed by Federal and State agencies, land planners and primary producers.
"The benefits of this are enormous," he said. "Not only does the Murray Darling Basin represent nearly half of our agricultural land, but it holds the major water supply for southern Australia.
"Our current limited knowledge of the soils of the Murray Darling Basin is one of the main reasons for a wide range of management mistakes. It also hinders the development of better land use planning for the Basin"
"These mistakes include degradation of agricultural land, with both on and off-site impacts, road surface collapses, poor waste and effluent disposal practices and a range of soil surface problems."
"However, it is unfair to blame these mistakes on the users who, too often, have had insufficient knowledge available to them about the soil properties, distribution and behaviour which affect the soils they are working with or using."
"For this reason, a joint Federal and State Department project to re-map the Basin's soils and have the information available so it could be easily understood, was crucial to users of the area," he said.
"This project will identify areas of land degradation, provide land-use planning information and an improved base for modelling Basin-wide impacts of critical industry activities," he said.
"An easily-accessible series of 1:250,000 map sheets with a new soil landscape legend will be developed. We will also have an electronically-tagged data for each map unit, which will show the profile for each unit as well as key suitabilities, hazards and risks."
For further information, please contact:
Dr Colin Chartres, CSIRO Soils
[Level Up] [Doc Top] [Doc End] [Next Item] [Home Page]