AWWA SOURCES59275

The Santa Clara Valley Water District (District) applied for and was awarded CalFed grant funds to accurately measure the classified large landscape areas of urban parcels and agricultural farmland within Santa Clara County. The project, which began in early 2002, acquired multi-spectral images of Santa Clara County, performed image analysis (classification) to identify the area of 18 different classifications for each parcel (site) and prepared a database of these area measurements to support Landscape Water Budgets as well as support the ITAP Landscape Survey and Agricultural Mobil Lab Programs. As described in the original grant application, the District is developing a database-backed website (WebITAP) to deliver real-time Landscape Water Budget information to property and landscape managers via the web. WebITAP will utilize the area measurements from this project to calculate the site-specific water budget. The District will routinely update each budget using evapotranspiration (ETo) data from the California Irrigation Management Information System (CIMIS) so that the budgets reflect actual site irrigation demands. Currently WebITAP is in the beta testing phase and will soon be released to the public. It is estimated these landscape water budgets will reduce water use for these sites by at least 10% (or 5,000 acre-feet per year for the entire county). These savings estimates will be verified through an extensive monitoring program, which will include the following: tracking of completed budgets; comparison of budgeted versus actual use (aggregate); tracking of number of sites that receive assistance; and, comparison of pre- and post-performance (water use relative to budgeted use). Includes tables, figures.