Assessing the contribution of golf course out-of-play areas to pollinator recruitment by remote sensing

Up to 20% of the total acreage of an 18-hole golf course in the US is dedicated to out-of-play areas. Encouraging the presence of these areas can result in the reduction of labor, equipment costs, and fuel consumption since out-of-play areas are not highly mowed or maintained. Additionally, these low-input areas promote the increase of biodiversity within a golf course, which is mainly dominated by turfgrass. Out-of-play areas are already existing features at a golf course, and their value is often underestimated. These areas could be considered source-and-sink of multiple beneficial insects, including those attacking turfgrass pests. The overall goal of this project is to catalog existing out-of-play areas in golf courses using remote sensing and find the common characteristics that make them successful on recruiting beneficial insects. Light reflectance collected by a multispectral drone from already existing out-of-play areas was paired with ground-truthing insect densities associated with those selected areas. Two light reflectance indexes showed the highest correlations between areas sampled and the presence of beneficial insects. The information generated from this project will help interested golf course superintendents in identifying those existing out-of-play areas recruiting these beneficials and promote their establishment within the course across multiple seasons.