Turfgrass pathologist Dr. Lane Tredway from North Carolina State University recently made a visit to Southeast Asia for the purpose of collecting dollar spot samples. From ATC's Thailand base, we went to Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines to collect dollar spot from many different grass types: bermudagrass, zoysia, seashore paspalum, carpetgrass, creeping bentgrass — even from some sedges. There is not much creeping bentgrass in Southeast Asia but we traveled to high elevations to find it at Dalat in Vietnam, at the spectacular Mount Kinabalu Golf Club in Sabah (below), and at Camp John Hay in Baguio.

Dr. Tredway has chronicled this trip in a post entitled Dollar Spot Expedition to Southeast Asia on the Turf Diseases website. 

Dollar spot is ubiquitous and is especially so on seashore paspalum turf. This project looks at the different strains of dollar spot as they are found on different grass types and in different geographical and climatic areas. The idea is that a better understanding of the dollar spot pathogen itself will allow for the development of better control measures for this disease in the future.