Dominic Petrella

Learn more about our research! A new, open access article by Florence Sessoms, Dominic Petrella, Gary Deters, Jillian Turberville and Eric Watkins has been published in Crop Science. Their study examined turfgrass mixtures and how the mixtures performed after short drought and recovery periods.

Breuillin-Sessoms, F., Petrella, D., Deters, G., Turberville, J., & Watkins, E. (2025). Response of cool-season turfgrass monocultures and two-way mixtures to sequential acute drought periods. Crop Science, 65, e21385. doi.org/10.1002/csc2.21385

Learn more about our research! A new, open access article by Florence Breuillin-Sessoms, Dominic Petrella, Nancy Ehlke, Donn Vellekson and Eric Watkins has been published in the journal Crop Science. This article discusses the research in which several cultivars of Chewings, hard and strong creeping red fescue were interseeded with spring wheat to examine the potential of this method for seed production in northern Minnesota. Unfortunately, this cropping system did not seem optimal for fine fescue seed production so more research is needed. 

By Florence Sessoms and Dominic Petrella

Learn more about our research! A new article from our group has been published in Plant Methods. This research found that layering photoselective filters results in more accurate simulations of foliar shade and offer advantages over neutral density shade cloth in research.

Petrella, D.P., Breuillin-Sessoms, F. & Watkins, E. Layering contrasting photoselective filters improves the simulation of foliar shade. Plant Methods 18, 16 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13007-022-00844-8

Check out our team’s latest efforts in educating the public about our work. Articles about the UMN Turfgrass Science team were featured in the last several editions of the MGCSA's Hole Notes publication.

Just before the 2016 annual meeting of the Crop Science Society of America, I was contacted by a graduate student from Ohio State University named Dominic Petrella who was interested in joining our group. We met for breakfast, and after talking about some AL Central baseball (Dominic is a rabid Cleveland fan), we started talking about the ways a plant physiologist could support turfgrass breeding and genetics--early in our conversation it became quite clear to me that he would be a great fit in Minnesota.

Check out our team’s latest efforts in educating the public about our work. Several members of our group including Eric Watkins, Dominic Petrella (now an assistant professor at Ohio State University), Nicole Mihelich and Florence Sessoms were featured in a video, Fescue Research at the University of Minnesota, on GCSAATV.

Watch the video below to learn more about several different fine fescue research projects we are conducting!

Learn more about our research! Three research articles from our group have been published in the September/October 2021 issue of Crop Science.

Learn more about our research! A research article from our group has been published in the August 2021 issue of HortTechnology. Read about the results of examining the drought performance of locally available retail lawn seed products.