The Great Salt Lake is shrinking. Your landscape is upstream.
The Great Salt Lake has lost more than 70% of its surface area since 1850. The cause is overwhelmingly upstream consumptive use — water diverted from the Bear, Weber, and Jordan River systems before it can reach the lake. Residential landscape irrigation is the single largest consumptive category on the Wasatch Front. Reducing landscape water use is the most direct citizen-level lever on lake elevation.
Your landscape is upstream.
Why landscape water on the Wasatch Front is Great Salt Lake water.
The Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake — it has no outlet. Water that enters the lake stays in the basin and either evaporates or remains. Inflow comes from three primary tributaries: the Bear River from the north, the Weber River from the east, and the Jordan River through Salt Lake County. All three pass through the corridor where most Wasatch Front residents live and irrigate.
Residential, HOA, and commercial landscape irrigation in Davis, Weber, Salt Lake, and northern Utah counties is consumptive use within these tributaries. Every gallon applied to a lawn that the soil cannot infiltrate, or that evaporates from a stressed canopy, is a gallon that does not reach the lake — within the same hydrologic year.
Reducing landscape water demand is therefore the most direct, fastest-acting, citizen-controlled lever on lake elevation available. It does not require a new reservoir, a new pipeline, or a federal court ruling. It requires changing how the landscape uses the water it already receives.
What landscape water reduction looks like in lake terms.
An acre-foot is the volume of water that covers one acre to a depth of one foot — roughly 325,851 gallons. Lake elevation, reservoir storage, and water-rights allocation are all measured in acre-feet. The chart below converts a typical residential landscape water budget into the same unit.
| Landscape type | Annual water use | Acre-feet |
|---|---|---|
| Conventional landscape | 104,000 gallons | 0.32 AF |
| Xeriscape landscape | 48,600 gallons | 0.15 AF |
| JLB-optimized landscape | 56,550 gallons | 0.17 AF |
Representative single-family residential landscape water use figures used in The Plant Institute program design modeling. Property-specific figures come from your free Water Savings Analysis. JLB-optimized landscapes retain functional canopy and turf — they are not reduced through removal.
Individual landscapes don't move a lake. A million of them do.
HOUSEHOLD
One Wasatch Front yard
A single household reducing landscape water use from a conventional baseline to a JLB-optimized landscape returns roughly 0.15 AF per year to the upstream watershed — meaningful for a single property's water bill, small at the lake scale alone.
NEIGHBORHOOD
An HOA corridor
A 200-home HOA corridor at the same scope returns roughly 30 AF per year to the watershed — comparable to a small irrigation share. This is the scale at which The Plant Institute municipal pilots are designed.
CITY
A full Wasatch Front city
A mid-sized Wasatch Front city, treated at scale, can return thousands of acre-feet per year to the basin. This is the scale at which landscape water reduction begins to register against the lake's annual deficit. Read the municipal program →
What actually moves landscape water back to the lake.
There are exactly three categories of intervention that reduce a residential landscape's consumptive water use without removing the landscape itself. Our protocols target all three.
1 · Canopy management
The largest single lever on most established Wasatch Front properties. JLB structural pruning reduces transpiration demand without removing the trees themselves. Read JLB →
2 · Soil correction
Where standard landscape contracts apply water to soils that can't absorb it, GreenRx soil work recovers the lost portion of every irrigation cycle.
3 · Irrigation optimization
Controller recalibration, head replacement, and ET-aware scheduling are applied after the pruning is complete, capturing a meaningful additional reduction. Read Irrigation Optimization →
Find out how much water your landscape would return to the watershed.
Written analysis from a Plant Institute researcher. 5 business days.
Free Water Savings Analysis
Wasatch Front and statewide.