A Method for Simulating Golf Traffic on Research Putting Greens.

Foot traffic on golf course putting greens is a concern among superintendents and adversely affects turfgrass resiliency, weed infiltration, pathogen susceptibility, and soil compaction.  Although breeding and research efforts have focused on wear-tolerance and recovery, accurate methods to simulate traffic on research plots are not well established.  Previous golf traffic simulators were able to provide adequate representations of wear, but did not account for recovery due to the daily pin rotations that are common on golf courses.   This study sought to develop a method to quantify the footsteps imposed on a golf course green factoring time for recovery and pin rotation.  The objectives of this study were to describe traffic observations made relative to time and pin rotation on a golf course, and to evaluate the efficiency and validity of the manual use of this data for putting green foot traffic replication.  Data was collected from observations taken during normal daily play on golf courses in Michigan, Arkansas, and Tennessee.  Golfer footsteps were counted as players walked onto the putting green, putted, and walked off of the green.  Five previous pin placements and the current placement were marked on the green using two concentric circles per placement; the outer circle measuring 15.70 ft_­­² and the inner circle measuring 12.56 ft².  Golfer footsteps were then recorded for each circle.  Traffic from the current pin placement accounted for 70% of the footsteps on the putting green, while traffic from each of the previous placements accounted for 14, 8, 3, 5, and 0% respectively.  Traffic applications to research plots should be rotated such that plots receive decreasing amounts of wear as the week progresses to simulate the recovery that occurs when the pin placement is moved away from the area of interest.