Our Solution

The AquaTamer App

AquaTamer is an app to help individuals, from farmers to home gardeners, to estimate the amount of water their plants need for the type of plant, the location, and the current weather condition. We do this by

  1. Identifying the type of plant (you take a picture, and we identify the plant species for you!)

  2. Find your location (via GPS)

  3. Use NASA's live Evapotranspiration data (from Satellites) to find out how much water will evaporate from that location - (from OpenETdata.org).

  4. Combine all this information to recommend how much water this plant needs this week at this location.

  5. Provide weather data so you can tell how much water the plant can get from rain and how much you should provide yourself!

Plant Identification via AI

The user takes a picture of their plant using their iPhone camera. We send this picture to our AI which identifies the type of plant. We use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), that can accurately identify different species of plants. We have trained our AI to identify different California native plants and are adding more plant varieties.

Evapotranspiration

Evapotranspiration is the process by which water is released into the air by evaporation from soil and transpiration by plants. Water that plants receive as rainfall or irrigation is lost by evapotranspiration.

If we can determine how much water is lost at any time, we can find a good amount of water to give back to the plant. Evapotranspiration depends on the location, the day and time, and the plant itself.

Estimating General Evapotranspiration

AquaTamer uses the iPhone GPS to find the location, and then uses the OpenET data from NASA to estimate the Evapotranspiration data for the last 2 weeks for that location. NASA's API uses satellite data and state of the art modeling techniques to estimate ET.

Adjusting for the plant

The general evapotranspiration rate has to be adjusted for each plant - some plants use more water than others! To do this - we use the plant species to check its Crop Coefficient (Kc), and do some math to adjust for each type of plant.

Putting it all together

Now that we know roughly how much water each plant will lose, how much should we add? That depends on how much rain there will be! AquaTamer provides the amount of water to add, and also links to the live weather report for the location, so that gardeners can determine whether to water or wait for rain!

Want to learn more about how to maintain a drought friendly garden? What other factors can impact water needs? Check out our resources here!