By Andrew Fielding
Golf greens are disaster areas
SINCE the 14th century,
when Scottish shepherds first knocked a stone down a rabbit hole with
their crooks, the golf course has traditionally been seen as a great place
to get some exercise and enjoy the countryside.
However, as golfers have become better players, they
have demanded better courses to play on. Dr Alan Gange, an ecologist at
Royal Holloway University, London, is studying golf courses, and the effects
they have on the local and wider environment.
As for the golfers, the quality of a green is determined
by how true and smooth the putting surface is. This affects the way the
ball rolls and can be seen ''just by putting a ball across it'', he says.
To maintain a perfect surface, the green is manicured to a point close
to ecological disaster. For the ball to run smoothly, the grass must be
short. It is mown to 1 4 -1 2 inches high; once or twice a week in winter,
once a day in the summer and twice when there is a tournament. Most grasses
would die if they were put under that sort of stress, but the grass cultivars
used have been specially bred to lie flat and put up with this regime.
The downside is that these new species require vast amounts of nutrients
to keep growing healthily.
As the ball rolls, it might hit a weed leaf or an upright
blade of grass. Both will impede its progress, and must be eradicated
by using vast quantities of herbicides. The grass has been specially bred
to resist this continual spraying. Another common obstruction on a poor
course is the small holes made by birds pecking at the soil-dwelling invertebrates
(insects). Both crows and magpies like to eat the underground larvae of
daddy-long-legs and chafer beetles. These insect grubs eat the roots of
the grass, and so are seen as a major pest by the green keepers who attempt
to get rid of them with insecticide. Unfortunately, this method does not
work very well.
Dr Gange's research has shown that there are actually higher levels of insect larvae on golf courses -it appears that soil compaction kills a symbiotic fungus, which usually grows among the grass roots and protects them from being eaten. When this protection is removed, the insect grubs thrive.
Another reason green keepers use insecticide is to
kill worms. As Dr Gange explains: ''There are 23 species of British earthworm,
but unfortunately two or three species produce casts - little mounds of
soil which the worm defecates on to the surface. You can't have these
casts on your nice, flat, golf green, but there isn't a pesticide that
will kill just the casting worms, so they have to eradicate them all.''
The problem is that worms do a good job aerating the soil. When they are
not there, and the golfers continually trample about, the ground becomes
compacted and liable to water logging. To prevent this, green keepers
have to spike the soil to aerate it. The grasses also require lots of
water, but because they must not be wet underfoot, the top layer of soil
in modern courses is composed of 80 per cent sand to drain quickly. This
means that water flows straight through the soil, and into the groundwater,
washing the fertilisers with it. Studies in other countries show that
this can end up in streams and rivers. The problem is that there is so
much money in golf that some green keepers can afford almost unlimited
amounts of chemicals and are likely to be greater polluters of the water
than farmers, who traditionally get the blame. No golf clubs have been
prosecuted yet in Britain, and the extent of the problem is unknown, but
in America, where more than 14,000 courses serve approximately 24 million
golfers, some clubs have been heavily fined for pollution.
EVEN the landscaping
around the greens is a problem. Trees growing along the edges of the course
are there as a windbreak. They can sometimes be fast growing, alien species,
which look artificial and cannot support the local wildlife. The lakes
that form the water traps are first in line to be polluted by fertiliser
runoff and are likely to be stagnant as a result. The playing surface
of a golf course, which receives lots of fertiliser and pesticide, provides
an extreme environment for plant growth. However, this surface represents
only about three per cent of the total area of a course, with tees and
fairways making up about 30 per cent. According to Dr Gange, two thirds
of the area of a typical course is not played on, offering potential benefits
for conservation. This means that in overall terms
golf courses have more of a positive effect on the environment than
a negative one.
Andrew Fielding, who is at Royal Holloway University,
London, came second in the younger category of the Young Science Writer
competition, run by the chemical company BASF and The Daily
Telegraph, with the backing of the British Association for the Advancement
of Science.