Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2010OK180B

Water conservation in Oklahoma urban and suburban watersheds through modification of irrigation practices.

Institute: Oklahoma
Year Established: 2010 Start Date: 2010-03-01 End Date: 2011-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $25,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $52,763

Principal Investigators: Justin Moss, Damian Adams, Tracy Boyer, Dennis Martin, Michael Smolen, Kemin Su

Project Summary: Water conservation is important for municipalities throughout Oklahoma. As urban and suburban sprawl increases in Oklahoma, large areas of previously non-irrigated pasture and/or croplands are being converted to irrigated homeowner and commercial landscapes. The consequential increase in irrigated turfgrass areas across Oklahoma will result in increased landscape water use. The goal of this project is to understand and promote more conservation oriented landscape water use in Oklahoma. The objectives of this project are as follows: 1. Assess current landscape water use and irrigation practices in Oklahoma urban and suburban areas through conjoint choice surveys. a. Survey homeowners and lawn care companies about perceptions and preferences concerning landscape/turfgrass aesthetics and accompanying irrigation practices, how they make landscape irrigation decisions, and economic factors including willingness to pay for water based on plant health and aesthetics versus associated economic water factors. 2. Determine the accuracy and reliability of remote sensing reference evapotranspiration (ET) data with established crop coefficients compared to actual landscape plant water use in Oklahoma. a. Calculate historical growing season reference ET from 1993 to present day using Oklahoma Mesonet remote sensing climate data using the Penman-Monteith method. b. Estimate actual plant water use by conducting field lysimeter and atmometer studies and measuring actual weekly water applied to adequately maintain bermudagrass over the growing season compared to Penman-Monteith reference ET. 3. Educate Oklahoma stakeholders and citizens of landscape irrigation practices to conserve Oklahoma water resources. a. Hands-on irrigation training and demonstration workshops conducted through the OSU Cooperative Extension Service. b. Fact sheets and interactive Oklahoma landscape irrigation website. This project addresses the following two OWRRI high priority research areas: Assess the economic value of current and potential future agricultural water conservation methods in Oklahoma (Objective 1). Develop/improve methods for accurately estimating evapotranspiration using remote sensing data that are of practical value to local resource managers (Objective 2). The proposed work would allow us to gather important and current data to determine the present situation of landscape irrigation in Oklahoma. If successful, future work would allow us to collect post-survey and post-implementation data to assess the effectiveness of our water conservation research and extension efforts.