UMN RESEARCH INTENSIVE IRRIGATION: EXPLORING CO2 EMISSIONS FROM TURFGRASS MAINTENANCE IN THE CITY OF ANGELS Dr. Michael Barnes University of Minnesota
We’re all aware of the sometimes intensive management involved and the subsequent CO2 emissions from keeping our turfgrass surfaces up to par, not only on the course but off it in our parks, home lawns, and multiple other landscapes where turfgrass exists. Despite how widespread turfgrass is across our urban and suburban landscapes, golf courses have drawn more criticism and scrutiny compared to other turfgrass dominated greens56
paces. Previous work has looked at individual maintenance practices (e.g. mowing) and extrapolated from there to assess and understand the estimated emissions from such practices. Additional work has taken these estimations and then applied them to either single types of turf landscapes (e.g. a park) or aggregated all turfgrass areas together to assess total emissions. While such studies are helpful in contextualizing emissions broadly, they lack both
scale and specificity. Specifically, what’s missing is to understand the different management regimes and then the spatial composition of different types of turfgrass landscapes within a broader community. To start to address these gaps in existing work, colleagues from the University of Redlands in California and I crafted a study that would tie together these different elements to better encapsulate and understand emissions from turfgrass