Digital soil assessment for regional agricultural land evaluation

The development of irrigated cropping is an important component of the strategy to intensify land use in sparsely populated northern Australia. An integrated resource assessment study has been conducted, with the aim of evaluating the potential for irrigated cropping in the Flinders and Gilbert river catchments - an area of 155,500 km2 in north Queensland. The coupling of digitally derived soil and land attributes with a conventional land suitability framework facilitated the rapid evaluation of regional-scale agricultural potential in this remote area. Approximately 50% of the total area was found to be suitable for a range of irrigated crops, but the vast majority of this area has significant soil limitations and other constraints to production. Growing crops successfully in the dry tropics of northern Australia remains a challenge. Quantified uncertainty associated with the digital soil mapping outputs was used to estimate the reliability of the land suitability assessments.