Urmia has many parks and touristic coastal villages in the shore of Urmia Lake. The oldest park in Urmia, called Park-e Saat, was established in the first Pahlavi’s era. Urmia’s largest park is Ellar Bagi Park (Azerbaijani “People`s Garden”) along the Shahar Chayi, or the “City River”. In most private landscapes in Urmia, water used for irrigation is potable water. As a consequence, poor landscape irrigation performance results in high economic and environmental costs. In addition, the Urmia water act gives the highest priority to urban uses in the case of drought. As a consequence the characterization of landscape water use is a valuable tool to rationalize water consumption in urban environments and in whole river basins. Landscape irrigation can become a key local water use in the presence of water shortages [1,2].
Water is a unique material in nature. It is capable of almost complete return of light waves from its surface. In addition to the water surface being seen, images of surrounding objects may also be reflected. When the surface is calm, extremely clear images of mountains, rocks, trees, wildlife, and at times, the observer him/herself are displayed. If the surface is ruffled by a breeze or by the flow of the water, the reflections lose their sharpness and detail, producing an impressionist’s image of the surrounding world. Water requirements for landscapes are calculated taking into account different factors, the two most important being the local climate and the type of species present in the landscape. Other factors include the coexistence of two or more species in the same area (i.e., turf, trees or shrubs) and factors modifying the climate, such wind exposure. Research work determining landscape water requirements (LWR) usually follows one of three methodological approaches: The first option is to put landscape water requirements at the level of ET0 values [3]. This comparison is logical if most of the landscape area is turf. The second option is based on direct estimation of landscape water requirements through the use of instruments such as volumetric soil water sensors [4,5] or weighing lysimeters [6]. The last group of authors [7] follows the methodology proposed by Costello et al., developers of the WUCOLS method for determining landscape water requirements. The WUCOLS method is based on ET0, and uses an ad hoc procedure to estimate the coefficients that replace the crop coefficient by a landscape coefficient