20 Analysing Landscape Futures for Dryland Agricultural Areas: a Case Study in the Lower Murray Region of Southern Australia Brett A Bryan, Neville D Crossman and Darran King CSIRO, Urrbrae, South Australia, Australia Abstract: There is an urgent need to reverse the declining environmental condition of rural landscapes across southern Australia. Current ap- proaches focus on natural resources management planning, policy and de- cision making at the regional level. Regional plans and associated on- ground investment have the potential to have widespread and long-lasting environmental, economic and social impacts. However, rarely are these impacts quantified and clearly understood. In this chapter we describe part of a large integrated project called the Lower Murray Landscape Futures (LMLF) which aimed to assess the im- pact of regional plans for the Lower Murray on selected environmental and socioeconomic indicators under alternative future landscape scenar- ios with input from stakeholders. The dryland component of the LMLF is a large-scale integrated regional planning and landscape futures analysis focussing on issues such as: agricultural production including food, fibre and bioenergy production; soil erosion; loss of terrestrial biodiversity; ris- ing watertables; and the salinisation of the land and waterways. The pro- ject was designed to be inclusive and engender collaboration amongst re- searchers, participation by regional stakeholders, and communication to regional stakeholders and communities. The intention is to provide useful evidence-based natural resource management planning advice to regional agencies. Landscape futures are plausible spatial arrangements of management actions (vegetation man- agement, ecological restoration, conservation farming, deep-rooted per- ennials, biomass, and biofuels) that achieve regional natural resource management targets, assessed under six policy options and five climatic