Estimating farm and landscape water use at the rural-urban interface using remote sensing and geographic information systems

This study investigated the urban landscape water conservation potential distribution among residential and commercial water users. It also presented the potential of agricultural water conservation and then discussed water conversion from agricultural to urban use. Using multispectral airborne digital images analyzed within a GIS environment gave solid estimates of actual landscaped area and consequently the estimates of water demand.; In the present study for the city of Layton, it has been shown that most of the subdivisions use more water than needed for landscape irrigation. The CII (commercial-institutional-industrial) users had the greatest potential for water savings, particularly those with smaller landscapes. The potential for greatest water savings is from mid to late summer when run times for automated systems are not being reduced as ET declines. The overall picture that emerges is that older landscapes without automated irrigation systems are less likely to be wasting water. The landscapes most likely to waste irrigation water are those that have automated systems not because of the automated system itself but because of the inefficiency in operating the system.; For the discussed five seasons (1997–2001), the study has also illustrated that there are some subdivisions that have excessive excess water (use a lot more water than needed for landscape irrigation), while their percentages of landscape area are low. On the other hand, there are some subdivisions that consume smaller amounts of excess water, while their percentage of landscape area is higher. This means that there are other dominant influencing factors such as the irrigation system used (automatic sprinkler or old manual system), income, education, retired heads, and the number of people living in the house. The research has also shown that there are houses in each subdivision that need to be identified for education on water conservation as they consume more than 70% of the total excess. Also, It is found that for the entire population there is about from 9%–13% of the parcels accounted for 50% of the total excess water.; This study has helped to answer one of the most important questions: what will happen if the agriculture area is converted to an urban area? Is the amount of water used in irrigation of the agricultural crops enough to supply the urban area, including the domestic usage and the landscape irrigation?; Finally, the developed software will allow easy access to the GIS database and to estimate the landscape water use in a friendly, flexible, and easy-to-update way. The developed software was verified on an independent set of images such as West Jordan City.