Precision Turfgrass Irrigation: Capturing Spatial Soil Moisture Patterns with ECa and Drone Data

Turfgrass irrigation consumes a large amount of the scarce freshwater in arid/semi-arid regions. Approximately 50% of this irrigation water is wasted. It has been suggested that determining patterns of spatial variability in soil moisture to modify applications with valve-in-head sprinkler technology can greatly reduce waste. Variable rate irrigation (VRI) studies in traditional agricultural settings have shown that VRI zones do not stay static temporally and need to be frequently redetermined. Electrical conductivity (ECa) data from Geonics EM38 surveys and data from Red, Green, Blue (RGB) and Thermal Infra-Red (Th.IR) drone surveys are less time-consuming and therefore expensive to collect than a dense field survey of soil moisture and grass health to produce accurate geostatistical maps. Drone flights and ECa surveys are compared here for their ability to accurately estimate spatial patterns of soil volumetric water content (VWC) using simple linear regression and z-score transformations for prediction—non-geostatistical approaches that require less data. Overall, ECa readings collected in the horizontal mode were the most consistent at capturing spatial patterns in soil moisture. Predictions from regression produced lower root mean squared errors (RMSEs) for the larger datasets. However, z-score transformation produced lower RMSEs when the sample number was very small and preserved the scale of values better than the regression approach. The results suggested that predictions from ECa and drone data were useful for capturing key features in soil moisture patterns for 2–3 weeks, suggesting that a periodic reassessment of zones is needed. Using ECa and drone data in an urban environment is more labor-intensive than in an agricultural field, so it is likely that automating periodic re-surveying of ECa data for zone definition would only be cost-effective for golf courses or high-income sports fields. Elsewhere, using static zones with variable rates applied to each zone may be more efficient.