Prologue: Amending agricultural water use to maintain production while affording environmental protection through control of outflow
Frank Dunin A C and John Passioura BA CSIRO Plant Industry, Private Bag 5, Wembley, WA 6913, Australia.
B CSIRO Plant Industry, GPO Box 1600, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia. Email: john.passioura@csiro.au
C Corresponding author. Email: frank.dunin@csiro.au
Australian Journal of Agricultural Research 57(3) 251-255 https://doi.org/10.1071/ARv57n3_fo
Published: 31 March 2006
Abstract
The long-standing debate about the problem of dryland salinity in Australia has been increasingly well informed. We chart here the deepening understanding of the processes involved in how plants use water and what this means for flows in the regolith, from the introduction of the idea of the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum 50 years ago, through the comparative patterns of water use by annual and perennial vegetation and the variety of their hydrological effects in different landscapes, to the realisation, as demonstrated by many of the papers in this special issue of AJAR, that the era of unviable simplistic solutions to dryland salinity is behind us. The mood now is one of cautious optimism that we will be able to develop a wide range of options for maintaining economically viable farming systems that protect the environment by controlling outflow well enough to arrest the spread of dryland salinity.
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