BVWaterSmart: An App for Water Conservation in Brazos Valley, Texas

This paper discusses the motivations and implementation process for a mobile application (app) that provides lawn watering recommendations in the Brazos Valley, Texas. The app is a free service provided by the BVWaterSmart campaign. Since 2012, BVWaterSmart has applied data mining and statistical techniques to identify candidates from more than 16,000 single-family residential households for conservation messaging and interventions. These activities have helped the City of College Station conserve the equivalent of three months of summer usage over seven years. With smartphones becoming more affordable and commonplace, mobile applications such as the BVWaterSmart app have the potential to provide watering recommendations and local rainfall statistics directly to residents to help them water their landscapes more efficiently. The BVWaterSmart app accesses neighborhood-level rainfall data from a server that receives data in real-time from a network of rain gauges and uses this data to provide watering recommendations for different types of sprinklers. The app, along with the underlying theoretical models, rain gauge infrastructure, rainfall data collection methods, data processing techniques, and educational interventions developed by BVSmartSmart, can be applied in other cities to realize critical water savings.