Winter stresses have long been a challenge for professional turfgrass managers. WinterTurf is a coordinated agricultural project to better understand turfgrass winter stresses and then identify solutions to this important specialty crop. Stefan Liess, a climate modeler working with MCAP, is helping the project team better understand how winters are changing to inform longer term strategies for plant breeding, genetics, and physiology; efforts to improve resistance to plant disease and thereby reduce pesticide applications; and new technological innovations to predict winter stress damage more precisely. The climate projections will help simulate changes at the golf course scale, and potentially predict how snow cover might change in typical winters by the end of the century.
The WinterTurf project is led by the University of Minnesota, in collaboration with University of Wisconsin-Madison, Michigan State University, University of Massachusetts, Iowa State University, Oregon State University, Rutgers University, Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, and hundreds of golf course superintendents across North America and Europe.
