The use of new techniques in turf grass irrigation for optimum water usage in urban green spaces

Since Iran is located in the arid and semi-arid belt in the world, it always confronts low water periods and frequent droughts. In recent years, attention has been paid to the protection of urban water resources, especially green space irrigation. Due to the key role of grass in designing and constructing green space and its high importance in community psychological safety, Maintaining the optimal quality of turf grass throughout the year is essential.
The current experiment is conducted with the aim of optimizing soil moisture using subsurface porous clay capsules in irrigating turf grass. The research was conducted in 2013-2014 in Agriculture Faculty of TarbiatModares University, as split plots in the form of totally random blocks with three treatments and irritations. The main factors include sprinkler irrigation (control), subsurface irrigation using subsurface porous clay capsule, and consolidated Irrigation; secondary factors include the lack of using superabsorbent, using A200 superabsorbent and acrylamide superabsorbent. soil moisture. In this study, indicators of moisture, volume of water consumed, turf color and density and root length, were measured.
The results showed that moisture change diagram represents the same trend in all treatments. In addition, the moisture has been between the plantation capacity and the maximum allowable discharge, and the plant has been under no moisture stress. The results of this experiment showed that the volume of consumed water in the treatments of sprinkler, consolidated and subsurface irrigation has been 7158.4, 4972.6, and 4243.8m3, respectively. In the subsurface and consolidated irrigation treatment , the volume of consumed water increased for 41 and 31% respectively, compared to sprinkler irrigation. This reduction trend was observed in the use of superabsorbent, in such a way that the subsurface irrigation treatment along with superabsorbent has shown the lowest water consumption in irrigation with the reduction of 51%. Irrigation method treatments had a significant effect on the root length. The highest and lowest root length was related to subsurface and sprinkler irrigation treatment, respectively, with the average of 23.56 and 20.50cm, respectively; and the significance level was 5%. In addition, increasing superabsorbent increased the root depth which was significant in 1% level.
Therefore, with regard to the water needs of lawns with subsurface irrigation system using porous clay capsules, this method could be employed as an irrigation method to optimize water consumption and reduce water loss. Yet, to make this system an applied method in turf grass irrigation, regardless of reducing water consumption, It needs to reduce its implementation cost compared with other existing methods.