Landscape-scale water use analysis with Remote Sensing image classification: UCLA Master's Coursework
The city of Beverly Hills, like much of Southern California, is undergoing prolonged drought conditions. Xeriscaping is a water-saving landscaping method focusing on replacing water-intensive lawn grass with less water-intensive native plants. In this course research project, I asked: how much water was saved by the removal of grass in Beverly Hills between 2009 and 2020? Sequenced object-based trained classifications were conducted on two NAIP image mosaics masked to cover the area of Beverly Hills, one from 2009 and one from 2020. Subsequent calculation revealed a loss of approximately 84,863.88 square meters of grass area over this time period. Based on existing studies of the transition from grass to xeriscaping, this likely corresponds to a savings of approximately 156.4 acre-feet of water per year. Notably, this is a relatively small fraction of Beverly Hills’ water budget, with the entire eleven-year annualized change less than savings obtained in one year by other water saving metrics. This may indicate relatively low importance of grass to Beverly Hills water management and/or resistance or lack of incentivization for a xeriscaping transition among Beverly Hills’ relatively high socioeconomic status lawn-owners.
My full report is at this link.