01-10-2003

Resource managers can now for the first time plan dryland salinity management strategies from the local to national level following the launch of a new risk assessment tool by the Chair of Australia's National Dryland Salinity Program (NDSP) today.

NDSP Chair Kevin Goss announced the launch of the Groundwater Flow Systems (GFS) Framework - Essential Tools for Planning Salinity Management during a major salinity and water quality conference - the 9th National Productive Use and Rehabilitation of Saline Lands (PUR$L) - currently underway near Rockhampton in Central Queensland.

"The framework provides a robust risk assessment approach for dryland salinity that can be applied at the catchment through to national level," he said.

The Groundwater Flow Systems framework describes and explains the behaviour of groundwater in response to recharge (water that drains below the soil to the groundwater stores). There are three major types of groundwater flow system - local, intermediate and regional. These system types vary in their physical characteristics, particularly responsiveness - the time over which catchment actions change salinity within the landscape or in the rivers.

The Groundwater Flow Systems framework will assist natural resource management planners to identify the most appropriate actions and prioritise their response to the salinity risk based on the:

• assets at risk;
• timescale for salinity increase;
• landscape locations best for targeted remedial actions;
• timescale for effects of remediation to be realised;
• social and economic cost of mitigation; and
• how and where to effectively monitor environmental change.

Dr Glen Walker, one of the architects of the framework and author of the report supporting the Groundwater Flow Systems framework launched at the PUR$L conference, said regional groundwater flow systems, for example, were typically very large and sluggish, responding slowly to changes in land management.

"Options for managing dryland salinity in these systems are quite limited," he said. "In such systems, we can expect to see the impacts of dryland salinity for many decades to come.

"However, the prospects for the much smaller local groundwater flow systems are very promising, as we can expect them to respond quickly to a change in land management."

The Groundwater Flow Systems framework has been developed with support from the Murray-Darling Basin Commission and the NDSP over a period of more than five years, building on earlier research by the Federal Bureau of Rural Sciences and the National Land & Water Resources Audit (NLWRA). The lessons from nine case studies catchments underpin the development of the Framework.

A continental map of GFS Framework was developed by the NLWRA to inform national and State level decision-making. This has been significantly improved for the Murray-Darling Basin, with a 1:1,000,000 resolution map, together with 1:250,000 maps for 10 of its regions. The latter maps are at a scale useful for catchment planning.

NDSP Chair Kevin Goss commented that building the capacity and structures for sharing salinity management information between regions - and drawing on the expertise of relatively few technical experts in the field - is a significant challenge.

"The GFS Framework now enables us to transfer the lessons from a few well-studied catchments to those with less data and research investigations," he said. "This is critical in a vast continent with extensive dryland salinity impacts and limited resources.

The summary report or full report of Groundwater Flow Systems Framework - Essential Tools for Planning Salinity Management are available free of charge and can be ordered from Canprint, Freecall (1800) 776 616.


For further information please contact:

Please contact Land & Water Australia
Email: land&wateraustralia@lwa.gov.au
Phone: 02 6263 6000