Golf Course Superintendents Form Winterkill Research Group.BOURNE Bourne, town (1990 pop. 16,064), Barnstable co., SE Mass., crossed by Cape Cod Canal; settled 1627, inc. 1884. Bourne Bridge (1935), across the canal, made the town an entry point to Cape Cod and a resort and commercial center. , Mass. -- Newly formed Winter Damage Initiative Group to research survival of creeping bentgrass and annual bluegrass bluegrass, any species of the large and widely distributed genus Poa, chiefly range and pasture grasses of economic importance in temperate and cool regions. In general, bluegrasses are perennial with fine-leaved foliage that is bluish green in some species. greens during Northeast winters A group of golf course superintendents in the Northeast, in conjunction with turf specialists from the University of Massachusetts The system includes UMass Amherst, UMass Boston, UMass Dartmouth (affiliated with Cape Cod Community College), UMass Lowell, and the UMass Medical School. It also has an online school called UMassOnline. , have begun a multi-year research effort looking at one of the Northeast's most pressing golf management issues - winterkill win·ter·kill v. win·ter·killed, win·ter·kill·ing, win·ter·kills v.tr. To kill (plants, for example) by exposing to extremely cold winter weather. v.intr. . During the study, the group will attempt to identify specific factors leading to winter-related turfgrass injury, determine best autumn management practices for preventing winterkill, and evaluate the effectiveness of various types of greens covers. "Traditionally, winterkill is something we'd experience to some degree every few years," says Tedesco Country Club superintendent Peter Hasak, who is spearheading the project. "But during the winters of 2001, 2003 and 2004, the problem was very widespread, and many courses got hammered. So a bunch of us got together and decided that we needed a specific course of action to figure things out." Winterkill can be caused by a host of problems, including turfgrass fungi, ice damage, desiccation des·ic·ca·tion n. The process of being desiccated. des  ic·ca , and direct low-temperature kill. According to Mary Owen, one of the participating UMass turf specialists, the ability to correlate specific weather events with turfgrass injury will be an important aspect of the study. "Our protocol will require that each superintendent monitor turf canopy temperatures and air temperatures using HOBO data loggers and send us turf samples on an ongoing basis," she explains. "We will grow out grasses from the samples in our greenhouse and analyze the collected temperature data to assess mortality/survival rates of the samples." To learn more about the Winter Damage Initiative Group, please email Evan Lubofsky at evan_lubofsky@onsetcomp.com. About Onset Onset Computer Corporation has been producing small, inexpensive, battery-powered data loggers since 1981, and has sold over 600,000 units used throughout the world by more than 26,000 customers. Onset data loggers and weather stations are used in a broad range of research and commercial applications in the natural resources market, including agriculture, forestry, fisheries, field biology, hydrology hydrology, study of water and its properties, including its distribution and movement in and through the land areas of the earth. The hydrologic cycle consists of the passage of water from the oceans into the atmosphere by evaporation and transpiration (or , and meteorology meteorology, branch of science that deals with the atmosphere of a planet, particularly that of the earth, the most important application of which is the analysis and prediction of weather. . |
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