Improving Park Maintenance Efficiency Using a Mobile Application

Background

Commercial products by vendors such as Toro and Rainbird allow for controlling irrigation systems using wireless technologies. These systems when applied correctly can significantly reduce water consumption and manual technician intervention for irrigation activities. In (Fazackerley, Campbell, Trenholm, & Lawrence, 2012), the authors described an adaptive irrigation control system that uses wireless soil moisture sensors to measure water content in the soil and dynamically calculate the watering requirements based on those readings. The adaptive irrigation system reduced water usage by 50% when use in a city park which had a weather-based controller. In (Zhao, Bai, & Zhao, 2007), the authors describe an automated irrigation system that calculates and applies water to green spaces. The authors successfully tested the system in a green space located on the campus of Beijing Forestry University for six months.