Prologue: Amending agricultural water use to maintain production while affording environmental protection through control of outflow

Abstract

The long-standing debate about the problem of dryland salinity in Australia has been increasingly well informed. We chart here the deepening understanding of the processes involved in how plants use water and what this means for flows in the regolith, from the introduction of the idea of the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum 50 years ago, through the comparative patterns of water use by annual and perennial vegetation and the variety of their hydrological effects in different landscapes, to the realisation, as demonstrated by many of the papers in this special issue of AJAR, that the era of unviable simplistic solutions to dryland salinity is behind us. The mood now is one of cautious optimism that we will be able to develop a wide range of options for maintaining economically viable farming systems that protect the environment by controlling outflow well enough to arrest the spread of dryland salinity.