SportsTurf

August 2011

SportsTurf provides current, practical and technical content on issues relevant to sports turf managers, including facilities managers. Most readers are athletic field managers from the professional level through parks and recreation, universities.

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FieldScience | Kevin Morris Traffic simulation For any turf evaluation, applying a stress uni- formly is necessary to obtain consistent, and thus accurate data. Consistent application is particularly important for traffic data, since re- search efforts on in-use athletic fields almost never produce consistent results. In addition, there are many different types of ‘traffic’, i.e. damage caused by golf spikes or cart use is dif- ferent from damage caused by a soccer goalie, or a large-bodied football lineman. “Traffic” can be separated by its various fac- NTEP traffic testing results A T ANY ONE TIME, the National Turfgrass Evalua- tion Program (NTEP) is evaluating more than 600 cultivars and experimental selection in nationwide tests. Data collected and summarized from these trials can be found on our website, www.ntep.org. Our data is also published on a CD, in exactly the same format as the NTEP website, which can be purchased. NTEP collects data on overall turf- grass quality, appearance characteristics like color and texture, disease and cold tolerance and many other traits. In re- cent years, however, NTEP has focused more on testing specific performance traits, such as traffic tolerance and saline irrigation performance. This article pro- vides insight on NTEP testing and an update on improved cultivars of the most commonly used species for athletic fields. 2010 CULTIVAR UPDATE The following is an overview of the latest traffic tolerance and other perti- nent information on commercially 8 SportsTurf | August 2011 available and experimental cultivars of the four main species used on athletic fields - Kentucky bluegrass, perennial ryegrass, tall fescue and bermudagrass. KENTUCKY BLUEGRASS This year we have data from the fifth and final year of the 2005 Kentucky Bluegrass Test. Since bluegrasses may take several years to develop significant levels of thatch and disease, the fourth and particularly the fifth year of a blue- grass trial can yield interesting results. We have witnessed this phenomenon with 2010 data, as disease, drought and heat have taken their toll on these grasses. Therefore, 2010 data is very use- ful for understanding how these grasses withstand these stresses. We advise that you investigate closely this fifth year of data, which is available on the NTEP web site, as well as the 5-year final sum- mary report, which will be available later this year. For those field managers that irrigate with salty water, salinity tolerance evalu- ations are now in the fifth year at the Las Cruces, NM site. The site irrigates tors, as described by Dr. James Beard in his seminal textbook, Turfgrass Science and Culture. Beard writes the following about turfgrass wear: “Direct pressure on the turf tends to crush the leaves, stems and crowns of the plant. Damage is greatly accentuated by the scuffing and tearing action frequently associ- ated with traffic.” Beard also discusses another aspect of traffic, compaction: “The mechanical pressure applied by human and vehicular traf- fic results in varying degrees of soil com- paction.” Compaction results in restricted air and water movement through the soil profile. Both wear and compaction require evaluating to determine effective cultivars and strategies to minimize traffic damage. Since necessity is the mother of invention, the turf research community has developed equipment to simulate wear, traffic and/or compaction on trial areas at universities. Each machine simulates somewhat different aspects of traffic stress. A particular NTEP species trial may therefore, receive different traffic damage at different locations. The most popular traffic simulator in the US is the “Brinkman,” developed at UC-Riverside. The Brinkman is pulled by a small tractor and consists of two rollers that are fitted with cleat- like spikes. The rollers can be filled with water to add compaction stress and can be set to travel at different speeds from each other, thus enabling a ripping and tearing action in the The Brinkman offers a relatively quick and easy method to apply traffic stress. >> BRINKMANN traffic simulator Continued on page 10 www.sportsturfonline.com By

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