Research Overview

Our research program centers on seven themes that are especially relevant to turfgrass managers in Minnesota. Each theme includes both ongoing projects and completed studies with results published in scientific journals. Most of our research is conducted at the TROE Center on the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus.

Improvement

Our research covers the entire pipeline of creating, testing, and producing superior turfgrass varieties. We integrate genomics and advanced phenotyping to accelerate the development of new cultivars, focusing on traits like stress tolerance, low-input needs, and disease resistance. Projects range from traditional breeding and cultivar selection to maximizing efficiency in seed production and testing seed mixtures in real-world environments, ensuring our innovations transition rapidly from the lab to the landscape.

Management

Our goal is to translate scientific findings into efficient and sustainable cultural practices for managers across all scales, from home lawns and roadsides, to golf and sport turf. This work involves trials to validate best practices for fertilization and irrigation efficacy, strategies for seeding and establishment, mowing height impact, and recovery from stress. We also work with seed producers to find sustainable and effective approaches to produce high quality turfgrass seed that is used around the world.

Water

We focus on optimizing turfgrass resilience and resource stewardship in a changing climate. Our approach spans the full breadth of the turfgrass lifecycle, from breeding more drought tolerant cultivars to studying cutting edge smart irrigation technology, individual behaviors and the diffusion of lawn water conservation information to help reduce water use on home lawns and other turfgrass systems.

Winter

We aim to develop long-term solutions for unpredictable winterkill by better understanding the mechanisms of disease, cold, ice, and freeze-thaw stresses so that we can predict when and where winterkill will happen. We conduct field trials, controlled environment studies, and coordinate on-site stakeholder-science research using cutting-edge methods like metabolomics to uncover key biochemical pathways that differentiate resilient plants from susceptible ones. This fundamental knowledge directly powers our applied strategies, accelerating the breeding of revolutionary, climate-ready turf cultivars and enabling the creation of novel predictive tools for managers globally.

Light

We are addressing the critical challenge of maintaining high-quality turf in light stressed environments like shade, high-light, and fluctuating light conditions. Our research delves into plant photobiology, investigating how turfgrasses adapt their overall architecture and allocate carbon to survive chronic shade stress. We utilize controlled environments to identify turfgrasses with different physiological responses to light stress along with determining important genes that are involved. This work is fundamental to developing new cultivars, better understanding the biology behind turfgrass responses to light stress, and creating novel management protocols that allow turf to thrive where traditional varieties fail.

Environment

We investigate the critical ecological role of turfgrass landscapes, from urban lawns to vast roadsides, by measuring their environmental footprint and ecosystem services and disservices. Research involves finding new ways to reduce water, fertilizer, and pesticide use in turf systems, enhancing pollinator habitats through bee lawns, and optimizing seed mixtures for improved ecosystem services. We conduct large-scale field studies to determine how turf contributes to biodiversity and sustainability in human-dominated landscapes, and then work with Minnesota residents to implement best practices.

Decisions

We aim to serve as the bridge between cutting-edge research and real-world adoption, positioning turfgrass science as a field that embraces social and economic innovation. This research integrates social science methodologies including human behavior modeling, social factors research, and economic analysis to understand how individuals, turfgrass managers, practitioners, and policymakers adopt new and more sustainable practices. Our goal is to measure the economic impact of turf management, identify barriers to innovation, and develop effective outreach and communication strategies that accelerate the integration of scientific knowledge into daily management decisions.

Featured projects

WinterTurf

Roadside Turf

Low Input Turf

Lawn care

Featured projects

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