By Marylee Murphy, University of Minnesota
The fourth year of survey data collection for the WinterTurf project just ended with approximately 130 courses providing data on one or more golf greens during the winter. Over the course of the four years, over 10,000 images have been contributed by the survey participants. These images have been critical for understanding the progression of winter conditions. The WinterTurf Dashboard (Figure 1) displays the images from the current year for each course that has opted-in to being displayed on the dashboard.
The project team has used these images to examine areal snow coverage (Figure 2), observe covering practices (Figure 3), put the green into context, identify typos in data entry, and look at sensor placements (Figure 4).
We are currently classifying the photos to use them to ground truth satellite imagery, which will help our team develop models that we hope will predict winter injury risk on golf courses, providing an important tool for turfgrass managers in cold climates.
