Landscape Management Practices to Optimize Passive Rainwater Harvesting and Plant Health

Rainwater harvesting is a sustainable way to augment or offset water for landscape irrigation and mitigate stormwater impacts in Arizona and the desert southwest. Annual evaporation in Arizona’s low deserts is 70 to 80 inches, and precipitation ranges from 4 to 12 inches per year (AZMET), which creates the need for supplemental water to insure healthy plant growth for non-native plants and for native plants in challenging settings such as hardscape-intensive urban areas. Longer, hotter summers, increasingly unreliable patterns of rainfall (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 2017), and increasing population (US Census Bureau, 2018) will require more water conservation measures to ensure sustainable growth and development of urban trees and forests. Water harvesting is an important water conservation method that can supplement other water sources, and is increasingly seen as a discrete supply of water.