Participating in this hands-on lesson, students in grades 6-8 will lead each other through the integration and application of a real-life situation. This lesson provides a PowerPoint and worksheets to help students understand precision agriculture and its use of geographic information systems to help farmers use a sustainable growing method.  Students will then integrate their knowledge and skills to create their own mini irrigation system.

A system for the capture and distribution of rainwater and graywater for the Living Canopy school garden project.

The course will discuss the objectives and functions of water management systems for irrigation and drainage purposes. Analysing system requirements in terms of technical engineering constraints, management possibilities and water users (wishes and options) is central. This includes the design and operation of regulation structures, dams, reservoirs, weirs and conveyance systems; balancing water supply and water requirements in time and space is a main focus of analysis too.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"A research team at MIT has spent years trying to unravel how climate change will affect Earth’s habitability in the future. Using sophisticated computer simulations, they’ve shown that extreme heatwaves will sweep across a region spanning southwest and south Asia, potentially rendering some areas inhospitable to human life. Now, in the third part of this ongoing study, they’ve shifted focus to China – currently the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Using regional climate models that examine how irrigation impacts surface conditions, the team found that the current pace of greenhouse gas emissions will leave North China Plain, an intensely irrigated region that is presently home to about 400 million people, vulnerable to extreme heatwaves, making it difficult for humans to survive in what is now one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. The reason? Irrigation exacerbates heatwave conditions, worsening the impact of climate change..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

In the Arizona desert, farmers depend on an ample supply of irrigation to grow their crops. As climate changes, irrigation managers face a host of issues to keep the water flowing.

Published by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, the 600-page manual covers practical aspects of organic farming and gardening, applied soil science, and social and environmental issues in agriculture. Units contain lecture outlines for instructors and detailed lecture outlines for students, field and laboratory demonstrations, assessment questions, and annotated resource lists. Although much of the material has been developed for field or garden demonstrations and skill building, most of the units can also be tailored to a classroom setting.The training manual is designed for a wide audience of those involved in teaching farming and gardening, including colleges and universities with programs in sustainable agriculture, student farms or gardens, and on-farm education programs; urban agriculture, community garden, and farm training programs; farms with internships or apprenticeships; agriculture extension stations; school gardening programs; organizations such as the Peace Corps, US AID, and other groups that provide international training in food growing and ecological growing methods; and master gardener programs.

Students are introduced to the concept of a dam and its potential benefits, which include water supply, electricity generation, flood control, recreation and irrigation. This lesson begins an ongoing classroom scenario in which student engineering teams working for the Splash Engineering firm design dams for a fictitious client, Thirsty County.