Soils

Land Tenure. Final Project Report

This project was initiated by the National Land and Water Resource Audit (NLWRA) with the intention of creating a Land Tenure data set with Australia wide coverage. There are several existing Tenure data sets but they are outdated or of a low resolution. The idea was to utilise the tenure data from the States and Territories in Australia and translate their data to a nationally agreed classification. To define this classification a workshop was held in Canberra in (more)...

Soil biodiversity and ecology

This report presents a review of some aspects of soil biodiversity and ecology, with emphasis on macro-invertebrates, as part of the Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment 2008 for the National Land and Water Resources Audit (NLWRA). Soils are not just inert means to support plants; rather they teem with a unique biodiversity that fundamentally influences above and below ground plant and animal (more)...

Wind erosion hazard

The purpose of monitoring is to set a benchmark for wind erosion hazard and observe how this hazard changes over time. This may be at a particular point, over a district or region or even nationally. Knowing the reason for change is important in directing management responses and policy direction. The justification is that wind erosion is a potent reminder of inappropriate land use. Its significance in terms of lost production, effects on human health and as a contributor to climate change (more)...

Monitoring soil condition across Australia

This report identifies a range of issues related to the local and broad scale monitoring of soil condition across Australia. Four priority processes which potentially have a major impact on the welfare of all Australians are wind erosion, water erosion, soil acidification and soil carbon change. These processes are difficult to monitor because either they progress very slowly or occur as irregular catastrophic events. In mid-2006 the National Land & Water (more)...

Soil condition monitoring trial

In mid-2006 the National Land & Water Resources Audit, via the National Coordinating Committee on Soil and Terrain, convened four expert panels to advise on how each indicator might best be monitored both locally for project management and accountability purposes, and at a broader scale for reporting on the condition of our national resource base. Late in 2006 a series of trials was initiated to confirm the recommendations of the expert panels and to explore any (more)...

Building a Business Case for Investment in Soil Information

Soil information is valuable, but the economic rationale for public funding of soil information – especially large scale mapping programs – appears to be poorly understood and/or articulated at present. Public investment in soil information needs to be strongly linked to market failure and public good arguments. A value chain concept and economic principles enable us to identify the following areas in which market failure arguments could be used in support of a ‘business (more)...

Monitoring Soil Condition

Water erosion hazard

Water erosion causes losses of soil that far exceed the rates of soil development and the on-site consequences affect agriculture by: decreasing soil volume available for the plant root to exploit selectively removing nutrients and organic matter breaking up paddocks into physically smaller units. Off-site effects relate to the sedimentation of creeks, rivers, estuaries and reservoirs, increased flooding, eutrophication, and the general (more)...

Soil organic carbon

Soil organic matter is a key soil component and plays a critical role in a range of physical, chemical and biological soils processes (Baldock 2007). Soil organic matter: provides energy for biological processes (Fontaine et al. 2003) and nutrients N, P, S improves the structural stability, influences water retention properties and alters thermal properties contributes to cation exchange capacity, enhances pH buffering and (more)...

Soil acidification

Soil acidity is a major land degradation issue facing much of Australia. It is important to know if it is being managed appropriately to avoid costly losses in production, negative implications for the environment and possibly restricted access to future markets for our agricultural produce. Different crop species and even different cultivars have a pH range within which they are most comfortable; nutrient deficiencies and toxicity’s appear as the pH moves outside this range. Many (more)...