Attenuation of urban agricultural production potential and crop water footprint due to shading from buildings and trees

Urban agriculture requires local water to replace 'hydrologic externalities' associated with food produced outside of the local area, with an accompanying shift of the water footprint (WF) for agricultural production from rural to urban areas. Water requirements of urban agriculture have been difficult to estimate due to the heterogeneity of shading from trees and buildings within urban areas. Wedeveloped CityCrop, a plant growth and evapotranspiration (ET) model that couples a 3Dmodel of tree canopies and buildings derived from LiDAR with a ray-casting approach to estimate spatiallyexplicit solar inputs in combination with local climate data. Evaluating CityCrop over a 1 km(2) mixed use, residential neighborhood of Vancouver Canada, we estimated median light attenuation to result in 12% reductions in both reference ET (ETo) and crop ET (ETc). However, median crop yields were reduced by only 3.5% relative to potential yield modeled without any light attenuation, while the median cropWFwas9% less than theWFfor areas unimpeded by shading. Over the 75 day cropping cycle, median crop water requirements as ETc were 17% less than that required for a well-watered grass (as ETo). If all lawns in our modeled area were replaced with crops, we estimate that about 37% of the resident population could obtain the vegetable portion of their diet from within the local area over a 150 day growing season. However doing so would result in augmented water demand if watering restrictions apply to lawns only. The CityCrop model can therefore be useful to evaluate trade-offs related to urban agriculture and to inform municipal water policy development.