THE RESEARCH PLAYBOOK great grass-growing weather. Another winter might bring warm temperatures in November, followed by a rainy December, and a cold January that turns pools of water into rinks of ice. Yet another winter bounces around from cold to warm to dry to wet and back around again – each time causing the grass to spend energy trying to survive the changes. Will turfgrass survive these conditions? It depends. Creeping bentgrass and Kentucky bluegrass would probably survive in all cases. Perennial ryegrass might struggle in the second and third situation( see Figure 1).
WINTER CHANGES FROM HERE TO THERE If you’ ve ever experienced a major snowstorm, you’ ve likely been interested in how much snow you received. You’ ll take regular looks out the door, trying to ascertain how many inches of snow have fallen on the patio chair you forgot to put away in the fall. After the storm ends, you’ ll go outside and try to find a representative place to measure the snow, or maybe take measurements at several locations and calculate an average. A drift of several feet might sit just beyond the porch, while the nearby lawn is almost bare. These changes in snow depth are a big problem for turfgrass field research. A few inches of insulating snow here or there could be the difference between plant survival and plant death.
Similarly, when water pools after a winter rain or when ice melts then freezes again when temperatures drop, two adjacent areas might have differences in ice thickness, color or smoothness. These inconsistencies over small spatial areas create problems when trying to conduct research that requires consistent conditions over a research trial. These microclimate differences are always present, even during summer research trials, but they are not nearly as disruptive to research in the summer as they are in the winter.
WINTER ISN’ T EVERYWHERE Every turf surface needs to be fertilized. Most professionally managed surfaces need pesticides or plant growth regulation. Topdressing is agnostic to location; not so with winter stresses, at least the most severe cases. For much of the world, winter isn’ t a big deal when it comes to turfgrass management, so the
Figure 2: Before deploying WinterTurf project environmental sensors, they were tested in the field during a cold Minnesota winter.
Photo by Andrew Hollman.
number of turfgrass managers dealing with this challenge is not that big compared to the overall population of turfgrass professionals. Therefore, funding and attention are diverted toward broader needs— efforts that will have a greater bang for the buck.
A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO WINTER RESEARCH It’ s clear that turfgrass managers need more research-based tools and solutions to reduce winter injury risk, so we needed to come up with an approach that wasn’ t restricted to a single place or year. Within a given winter, there will always be damage somewhere; so we wondered if we could somehow track damage across space and time to learn how and why grass was dying, then come up with solutions to prevent winter damage. sportsfieldmanagementonline. com May 2025 | SportsField Management
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