Many of you are golf course superintendents who helped collect data last season for our WinterTurf Project; we truly appreciate all the assistance you have provided. Now we are starting our efforts to sign up past and new participants for another winter of data collection that will start later this year after the current golfing season.
Goal of the project
We are collecting data on winter stress injury to help develop solutions to this serious problem that affects so many golf courses in northern regions all over the world. As part of our plan to find solutions, we need to collect data at as many sites as possible to capture all the most likely factors that are involved in winter injury.
What are we asking you to do?
We are asking you to monitor 1-3 greens on your golf course throughout the winter. This will include taking some photos and notes about the green going into winter, then measuring snow depth on the green and making some general observations each week during the winter, and finally doing a final assessment after winter.
Why participate again
We hope those of you who did it in the past will consider continuing another year. The data collection process will be similar to last year with a few improvements based on your suggestions. Past volunteers like you are particularly important to keep in our research study so we can see what happens at the same site over different years with different weather conditions.
Why participate for the first time
We also hope to recruit new golf courses because the amount of data needed is substantial for our project to be successful. If you haven’t joined, please consider it for this year. Check out some of the #WinterTurf participants’ tweets from last year and their experiences below as inspiration. As one of the superintendents commented last year “The weekly survey was easy and smooth.”
We would appreciate any help you can provide to get the word out by forwarding this message to colleagues or promoting our #WinterTurf tweets through social media.
How to sign up
The process is the same whether you helped collect data last year or are new this year: please complete the survey below and we will email you with further instructions when data collection starts.
Sign up here: z.umn.edu/interest-survey
If you would like more information, visit our Be a part of the WinterTurf project! webpage. Please contact Kristine Moncada at [email protected] if you have questions.