Spatial Patterns of Development Drive Water Use

Abstract

Water availability is becoming more uncertain as human populations grow, cities expand into rural regions and the climate changes. In this study, we examine the functional relationship between water use and the spatial patterns of developed land across the rapidly growing region of the southeastern United States. We quantified the spatial pattern of developed land within census tract boundaries, including multiple metrics of density and configuration. Through non‐spatial and spatial regression approaches we examined relationships and spatial dependencies between the spatial pattern metrics, socio‐economic and environmental variables and two water use variables: a) domestic water use, and b) total development‐related water use (a combination of public supply, domestic self‐supply and industrial self‐supply). Metrics describing the spatial patterns of development had the highest measure of relative importance (accounting for 53% of model's explanatory power), explaining significantly more variance in water use compared to socio‐economic or environmental variables commonly used to estimate water use. Integrating metrics characterizing the spatial pattern of development into water use models is likely to increase their utility and could facilitate water‐efficient land use planning.

Satellites to Sprinklers: Assessing the Role of Climate and Land Cover Change on Patterns of Urban Outdoor Water Use

“…These results are similar to findings by Sanchez et al. (2018), which show that more dense, clumped development leads to lower total residential water use in North and South Carolina. This effect may be due to the reduction in irrigated area within a census block group due to the increase in impervious area, especially for census block groups with impervious area greater than 40%.…”

Impacts of Urbanization on Watershed Water Balances Across the Conterminous United States

“…However, climate change impacts, including increases in atmospheric CO 2 concentration, air temperature, and a higher frequency in extreme events, are expected in the 21st century (Wuebbles et al, 2017). These changes will no doubt affect watershed water balances (Martin et al, 2017; Vose et al, 2016) and water use and demand by humans (Sanchez et al, 2018). Thus, the hydrologic effects of urbanization are not likely to occur in isolation but act together with climate change.…”

“…Rapid urbanization poses serious stresses to watershed ecosystem structure, function, and services such as water quality degradation (Grimm, Faeth, et al, 2008; Sun & Lockaby, 2012; Sun & Caldwell, 2015), localized climate impacts such as Urban Heat Island (UHI) and Urban Dry Island phenomena (Hao et al, 2018), and increased water demand in cities (Hao, Sun, Liu, & Qian, 2015; Sanchez et al, 2018). Watershed hydrology plays a critical role in regulating water quality, aquatic ecosystems, wildlife habitats, and human health (Sun et al, 2017; Sun & Lockaby, 2012).…”

When Small Is Not Beautiful: The Unexpected Impacts of Trees and Parcel Size on Metered Water-Use in a Semi-Arid City

“…For instance, the presence of outdoor water features, like swimming pools and hot tubs, has been shown to impact water consumption and there is reason to believe that more households are adding these features to their properties, especially with social distancing guidelines presented during our most recent covid-19 pandemic. Landscape configuration (e.g., spatial arrangement of buildings or vegetation) plays an important role on urban structure and microclimate and has been shown to impact water consumption patterns [17,60]. Furthermore, landscape metrics such as vegetation patch size and tree density can provide additional insight on irrigation trends, particularly under changing climate and precipitation patterns.…”