Influences of climate,terrain and land cover on stream salinity in southeastern Australia,and implications for management through reforestation

Reforestation of cleared land has the potential to reduce groundwater recharge, salt mobilization and streamflow. Stream salinity change is the net result of changes in stream salt load and streamflow. The net effect of these changes varies spatially as a function of climate, terrain and land cover. Successful natural resource management requires methods to map the spatial variability of reforestation impacts. We investigated salinity data from 2000 bores and streamflow and salinity measurements from 27 catchments in the Goulburn–Broken region in southeast Australia to assess the main factors determining stream salinity and opportunities for management through reforestation. For groundwater systems of similar geology, relationships were found between average annual rainfall and groundwater salinity and between groundwater salinity and low‐flow salinity. Despite its simplicity, we found that the steady‐state component of a simple conceptual coupled water–salt mass balance model (BC2C) adequately explained the spatial variation in streamflow and salinity. The model results suggest the efficiency of afforestation to reduce stream salinity could be increased by more than an order of magnitude through spatial planning. However, appreciable reductions in stream salinity in large rivers through land cover change alone would still require reforestation on an unprecedented scale. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.