Soil humidistats and flow monitoring along urban segments of US state & federal highways

[TomRinAZ-USA]

A collaborative community-based project has been proposed to establish
demand-based landscape water management practices along state and
federal freeways. Over 30 years in the making, Arizona can lead the
nation in standardization of public landscape irrigation across such
heavily irrigated states as Texas, California, Colorado, and New
Mexico. If government agencies adopt locally uniform irrigation,
including scientific irrigation water budgeting and distribution
uniformity performance specification as aprocurement requirement, then
soil moisture monitoring will finally be necessary. The way things are
now, wide disparity ranges across every step in the irrigation of
public works, which breeds frustration among system operators. There
is no reason for such chaotic application and precipitation rates per
unit of canopy cover, per drought tolerance category.

Transportation corridors are rife with infrastructure for increased
density of our urban forests. Carbon sequestration, pollutant
interception, heat-island mitigation, heat-island reduction, and noise
abatement, all are improved. Wireless soil moisture and flow data
acquisition along these corridors can even reach into neighborhoods
where parks, schools, and common areas share similar plant and tree
species. Bringing uniformity, i.e. application rates and frequencies,
to these government facilities will then be accepted by the private
sector. Exemplary behavior starts in government agencies and
especially schools. A little press and fan fare from the Depart.of
Interior and the EPA could finally tip society into shared and common
beneficial water use for irrigation.