1999 2ND PLACE

Golf greens are disaster areas

By Andrew Fielding 

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.