“convince Me All Your Bloody Data and Maps Are Going to Help Me Manage Salinity Any Better ?” Subtitle: Geoscience Frameworks and Their Application to Salinity Assesment and Management

When you boil it all down, the management of dryland salinity requires technically feasible and effective management practices to be adopted by land managers. In most areas these will be farmers who must incorporate these practices while maintaining viable farming enterprises in tough and competitive environments. These land managers, or community-based catchment authorities, seek sufficient knowledge from people like us to make informed decisions about salinity, and are not in the business of scientific enquiry for its own sake; they ‘...manage farm businesses, not salinity...’ Initially, land managers ask ‘...where is the soil salinity...?’, and ‘...why is it here...?’ To answer these questions, scientists require tools that map its extent, explain its distribution and causes. Spatial data maybe required to effectively answer these questions and does provide unparalleled insights into what lies beneath the ground. The questions which follow are, (1) ‘...is it going to spread, when and where to...?’, (2), ‘...well now tell me how I can manage it...’, and (3) ‘...what will that cost me?’. Farmers and public resource managers then turn to scientists who often argue that these questions logically demands spatial data to generate ‘a greater understanding that will lead to more certainty in selecting management options’. The question is however, ‘does a greater knowledge lead to certainty and does that result in more effective management’? In the context of these basic questions, we also commonly hear that the reason why the area of dryland salinity is spreading is that we are limited in our ability to manage it for three reasons; (i) poor availability of economic options, (ii) inadequate geospatial data which prevents targeted intervention and (iii) some land managers are wary of the science that supports our understanding of dryland salinity and its management. This paper reviews the second and third of these fundamental issues (because the first is a truism) in the context of salinity mapping, assessment of salinity risk and the application of geospatial data for its management. In doing this we look at the application of airborne geophysics and related datasets in the context of the question, ‘does this data add useable knowledge that would help the profitability of my farm business, or assist local communities in better managing salinity?’