13.1  Soil salinity survey

In conjunction with the Rice CRC for SRP and CSIRO Land and Water, CICL has been contributing to a PhD research project aimed at monitoring changes in soil salinity at nine key sites in the CIA.  The project will monitor the nine sites over a period of two years. CICL will continue to monitor these sites after that time.  CICL has contributed funding towards the project in order to learn how to best implement NRM.

The study sites are being monitored with an EM-38, which will be calibrated by one- and two-metre soil cores.  Installed at two sites to monitor watertable depth are two three-metre testwells and two three-metre piezometers, all of which have dataloggers attached. These sites will be monitored every month.  The remaining seven sites have a testwell and a piezometer with a datalogger attached to each.  These sites will be monitored every six months.

Plate 13.1  CICL staff taking soil samples for the salinity project

Table 13.1 gives a description of each study site, and Figure 13.1 shows the locations of the sites.

Table 13.1  Salinity Project - site description

Figure 13.1  Location of Salinity Project sites