basin

Methods for Assessing the Health of Lake Eyre Basin Rivers

This report provides the required background resource material to enable proceeding to the implementation stage of an assessment of the condition of river ecosystems and catchments in the Lake Eyre Basin.

Investigating lake/groundwater interactions at Lake Tutchewop

Salinity is an on-going environmental concern that causes damage to agricultural land, downstream water users, aquatic ecosystems and biodiversity, as well as to regional and urban infrastructure. One strategy to manage increasing salinity in the Murray Darling Basin is the construction of 13 major salt interception schemes that divert 550,000 tonnes of salt away from the Murray River each year (Figure 1). The Barr Creek Drainage Disposal Scheme is one of these schemes diverting saline water into (more)...

Coordinating Deep Drainage Research in the Northern Darling Basin - Final Report

A key issue identified by the research community working with the cotton industry was the lack of understanding and acceptance of the concept of deep drainage. Deep drainage is defined as the part of the water (applied to the surface and as rainfall or irrigation) that moves past the rootzone. In general the existing paradigm was “cotton soils don’t leak”. However, the research community related to the Australian Cotton CRC (ACCRC) (more)...

Views on Irrigation Policy in Australia and Experiences from Brazil and China

Water policy in Australia is undergoing considerable and unprecedented change. Most recently, the emphasis on the sustainable management of water resources in the Murray Darling Basin has seen a shift of control from the States to the Commonwealth. The declining availability of water and the subsequent approaches taken by governments have come under increasing scrutiny from the public. Indeed, the actions associated with water policy in Australia, particularly water used for irrigated agriculture, have (more)...

Implications of water reforms for the national economy

FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS in the 1880s by individual farmers along inland rivers and, in particular, the efforts of the Chaffey brothers at Renmark and Mildura in 1887, the irrigation industries in Australia have expanded to where they now use three quarters of all water used, have a combined area of about 2.6 million hectares under irrigation and produce agricultural outputs worth over $9 billion. Irrigation industries are an (more)...

Views on Irrigation Policy in Australia

Water policy in Australia is undergoing considerable and unprecedented change. Most recently, the emphasis on the sustainable management of water resources in the Murray Darling Basin has seen a shift of control from the States to the Commonwealth. The declining availability of water and the subsequent approaches taken by governments, have come under increasing scrutiny from the public. Indeed, the actions associated with water policy in Australia, particularly water used for irrigated (more)...

Understanding Evaporation

Right now, it is very diffi cult to accurately measure the water losses from evaporation on farm dams but a recent scoping study funded by the National Program for Sustainable Irrigation estimated the loss is as high as 7,000 gigalitres per year from Queensland’s section of the Murray-Darling Basin alone. Given that water extracted from our waterways for all purposes is around 20,000 gigalitres per annum in the whole of Australia, the potential savings from addressing evaporation losses are obviously (more)...

Managing landscapes to meet public biodiversity and farm business goals

Salinity impact on Lower Murray horticulture

The project was developed to test the hypothesis: ‘a depressed leaching efficiency (LE) in the Lower Murray irrigation districts raises the root zone salinity and, improved water use efficiency (WUE) has an upper limit determined by that field’s LE and its variance’. The specific objectives were to: Determine/update the salinity relationships for irrigated horticulture along the Lower (more)...