ABSTRACT
Land holders and land management agencies require spatial information to make decisions which will ensure that Australia’s dryland agricultural systems are sustainably managed. The current issues include salinization, sodicity, waterlogging and drought. Integration of remote sensing (at a variety of scales) and field data accurately positioned using Global Position Systems (GPS), within the framework of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with knowledge of the underlying processes forms the basis of the spatial information. Four recent examples are briefly reviewed in this paper, they are:
1. using reflective remotely sensed data to up-scale 1 m2 field measurements of Leaf Area Index (LAI) to regionally (18,000 km2) estimate LAI;
2. mapping moisture availability using daytime thermal remote sensing; 3. scaling soil properties using RADAR to map sodic soils ; and 4. determining salinity risk for a regional catchment by linking GIS with a
groundwater model.
