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6 Arizona Water Resource March-April 1997 W~ Special Projects Desert Landscaping CD-ROM Water conservation as a concept is almost universally supported. In practice, however, water conservation pro- grams can be difficult to implement and even harder to evaluate. Yet, the potential of water conservation to en- hance the value of Arizona's s:arce water resources cannot be ignored. That potential is high for municipal water uses, t~e fastest-growing demand sector. It is particularly compel- hng for outdoor water uses su.:h as landscape irrigation, in part because indoor demand b"comes effluent, which can be used or recharged, while outdoor demand is lost through evaporation and evapotranspir,ltion. Still, significant barriers to water-efficient landscaping remain. These include the difficulty of eradicating existing turf, the growing aversion to landscapes that take water conservation to extremes (so-ea.lled zero-scapes or hardscapes), and difficulties in selecting drought-tolerant plants that will create an inviting outdoor are~~. The need for a more comprehensive, easy-ta-use informa- tion source on drought-tolerant landscaping was recognized by the Groundwater Users Ac.visory Committee of the Ari- zona Department of Water Resources' Tucson Active Man- agement Area. In 1995, they fUnded a conservation assis- tance project submitted by the University of Arizona's Water Resources Research Center to develop a multi-media CD-ROM on landscaping with drought-tolerant plants. A year of development produced Desert Landscaping: Plants for A Water-Scarce Environment. The heart of the CD-ROM is a multi-media data base on some 600 dro.ught-to1~rant landscape plants. There are nearly 100 Items of mformatlon for each plant, including common and botanical name, size and growth characteristics, water, sun, soil and temperature needs, xeriscape zone, flower color and season, growth rate, habitat value, area of origin, and dozens of others. In addition, there are multiple pictures of each plant, including a whole-plant shot, a close-up of its flower or seed pod, and the plant within a landscape. Pro- nunciations of the common and botanical names also are included. Gathering all the necessary information and pictures for such a massive data base was gready assisted by a 22-member project advisory panel consisting of many of the foremost experts on desert plants in the Tucson and Phoenix metro- politan areas. The group included nursery owners, profes- sors, master gardeners, and landscape architects. Individual panel members made available their photo and slide collec- tions, provided data for particular plant categories, verified data base entries, and pronounced botanical names. As a group, the panel discussed issues of how people seek infor- mation on plants, how to warn of plant shortcomings such as poisonous seeds or invasiveness, and served as a sounding board for prototype user interfaces. Towards the end of the project, several panelists served as beta testers. The programming challenge was to provide users with multiple ways to seek information on low water-use plants through an intuitive and attractive program interface. The fmal design provides analogs to three common ways of The Plant Selector allows the user to select a broad category of plants such as cactus or to describe in detail the type of plant sought, such as a tree 12-24 feet high with yellow flowers, hardy to frost, a rapid grower, and native to the Southwest. Matches are displayed in thumbnail pictures. Clicking on a thumbnail im.ge brings up a full screen of inj.Jrmation on that plant Additional /;.,tanical information is available at the click of a /mtton. Clicking on any of the pictures in the CD causes them to expand to full-screen size.