Overview and Learning Objectives
Overview
Plants growing in controlled environments, like a greenhouse, require irrigation for them to grow. Similarly, in outdoor settings such as with golf course turf, home gardens, and field crops, if prolonged drought conditions exist, supplemental irrigation will be needed to maintain healthy plants.
Irrigation is defined as “the watering of land (or other plant growth media) by artificial means to foster plant growth”. This can be very costly, and the availability of supplemental water may be scarce, so it is important to be able to calculate accurately how much water to apply and when.
This lesson will introduce to the underlying concepts you will need to consider.
Learning Objectives
After completing this lesson, you will be able to:
- Explain how the systems approach can be used to manage water in irrigated systems.
- Identify the fluxes (flows) of water and energy in an irrigated soil-plant-atmosphere (SPA) system.
- Describe how the Irrigator's Equation can be used to quantify the four (4) major variables involved in managing irrigation systems.
- Use the principle of conservation of mass to determine the water budget (also called water balance) of a soil-plant-atmosphere (SPA) system.
- Use the principle of conservation of energy to determine the energy budget (also called energy balance) of a SPA system.
Earn an industry recognized micro-credential at: CSU Upskill.
Irrigation - the artificial application of water on plants to promote growth.
Systems approach - a problem-solving pattern that considers a physical or conceptual group of entities (parts) that interact and function as a whole unit.
Flux - rate of flow of matter (e.g., water) or energy (e.g., heat).
Irrigator's Equation is (a * D = q * t); where a = irrigated area, D = depth of applied water, q = volume flow rate of irrigated system, and t = run time.
Conservation of mass - total mass of a substance (e.g., water) in an isolated system remains constant at a given point in time; the substance just exists in different forms (e.g., liquid, gas, etc.) or in different parts of the system.
Water budget - the sum of water fluxes in a system; the total amount of water in an isolated system at any given time.
SPA - soil-plant-atmosphere system.
Conservation of energy - total energy in an isolated system remains constant at a given point in time; the energy just exists in different forms (e.g., solar radiation, heat, etc.) or in different parts of the system.
Energy budget - also called energy balance; the sum of all forms of energy in a soil-plant-atmosphere system.