UMN RESEARCH
HACKING AWAY AT WINTERKILL
Eric Watkins and Bryan Runck, University of Minnesota The winter of 2024-2025 proved to be another data collection success for the WinterTurf project. Over 70 environmental sensing nodes were deployed on golf courses across the world, with 19 in Minnesota (Figure 1); these units recorded air and soil temperatures, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other environmental parameters all winter long. 60
As you can imagine, this ends up being a lot of data to handle. The initial challenge for our team was to design the nodes and then get them deployed on golf courses. Our next challenge was to make sure the data was getting from the golf course to our database, and then making sure the data was accurate. Now that we can check those two tasks off as complete,
we turn to making sense of all this data. How can we leverage all this data to learn about winter damage on golf greens? Funding from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has allowed us to assemble a solid team of researchers, many of whom have no prior turfgrass research experience, which means we’ve spent considerable