This week I spoke to a full room of turfgrass managers at Bangkok's Thana City Golf and Sport Club about an important topic: understanding data for use in turfgrass management. I've recorded this video of the presentation slides in which I discuss the two classes of data that can be collected – data about playing surface performance, or data about plant growth – and then I go into some detail about soil moisture and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), with a brief mention of salinity and soil pH at the end.

There were many questions and an active discussion in this seminar and in fact lunch time arrived before I could speak about salinity and soil pH, so this video provides the narration of what I would have talked about had there been more time.

David Lau from Spectrum Technologies, pictured with me at right, gave an interesting presentation in which he talked about a broad range of meters and software that can be used to collect and analyze information for improving turfgrass performance. This is part of what PACE Turf call Precision Turfgrass Management (PTM), which is a systematic effort to provide optimum turf performance using minimum resources. As David mentioned, we cannot manage something if we do not measure it.

For more information about the data I discussed, you may be interested to read this report about putting green performance, including extensive sections and data on soil moisture and temperature, and this report about photosynthetic irradiance.