What is dryland salinity?
Dryland salinity is when salty groundwater affects soils, causing plants to wither and die. It has resulted from clearing native deep rooted plants and replacing them with shallow rooted annual crops and pastures. These shallow rooted crops are inefficient in their use of the annual rainfall, allowing much of it to escape beyond the root zone to the groundwater system below. This is in contrast to deep-rooted native vegetation that only allows small amounts of annual rainfall to escape past the root zone. This excess recharge of water below the root zone causes the typically saline ground water to rise bringing it in contact with roots of crops.
