Assessing Residential Outdoor Water Conservation Potential Using Landscape Water Budgets
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 148, Issue 6
Abstract
Landscape water budgets provide a benchmark of efficiency in residential outdoor water consumption, as well as a means of assessing overirrigation and possible water savings through conservation. This study investigates outdoor water conservation potential by analyzing trends, patterns, and drivers of overirrigation across 14,300 single-family residential customers in a central Texas city over a 5-year period (2015–2019). Customers exceeding their budgets were categorized using a bivariate framework based on temporal and quantitative measures of overirrigation. Between one-third and two-thirds of the customers exceeded their budgets during at least 1 month of the growing season, wasting an average of of water annually. Approximately 10% of customers contributed 56% of the total overirrigation during the study period. Overirrigation occurred throughout the growing season, but the number of customers and total volume wasted were highest in the fall months. Both overirrigation frequency and the amount wasted per unit of area tended to increase with property market value and decrease with landscape size. The methods and findings presented in this study can help water utilities evaluate potential outdoor water savings in their service areas and identify candidate customers for conservation interventions, such as landscape irrigation audits and educational workshops on efficient landscape watering.
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Data Availability Statement
Some of the data used during the study are proprietary or confidential in nature and may only be provided with restrictions. The water consumption data were obtained from the City of College Station Utilities. The reference evapotranspiration data were obtained from the TexasET Network. The property data are publicly available and can be obtained from the Brazos Central Appraisal District. All data analysis was conducted using R. Please contact the authors Alan Lewis and C. Prakash Khedun for further information regarding the data access.
Acknowledgments
We thank the City of College Station Utilities, and especially Jennifer Nations, for providing the water billing data. We also thank the Brazos Central Appraisal District for the property data, and the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension for the ET data. We are also grateful to David Smith, Dr. Tim Pannkuk, Vinit Sehgal, and our reviewers for their insightful and supportive comments, which substantially improved the content and clarity of this paper. Financial support for this project was provided by the City of College Station Utilities and the Brazos Valley Groundwater Conservation District.
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Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 148 • Issue 6 • June 2022
Copyright
© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: May 10, 2021
Accepted: Jan 5, 2022
Published online: Mar 23, 2022
Published in print: Jun 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Aug 23, 2022
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