The health of turf grass is critical to sports venues and the performance of sportsmen and sportswomen that use it. Parameters such as density, hardness, water absorption, drainage and wear resistance are all critical parameters for ensuring turf grass quality in both amateur and professional sport.
To better understand the effects of substrate type, irrigation, fertiliser scheduling and environmental conditions on turf and athlete performance, CultinovaEDGE™ technology was used selected to realise a monitoring and management system for high-end sports turf applications.
Working closely with STRI, world leaders is high end sports turf management, a custom turf substrate and environmental monitoring system was developed that enabled the fully automatic measurement of moisture, temperature and electrical conductivity at multiple points across and within the depth of a sports field.
Field substrate measurements were complemented with light intensity, air temperature, humidity, wind speed and wind direction measurements to complete the automated measurement dataset.
To support the turf grass monitoring hardware, Cultinova was tasked with the development of a web-platform that would not only allow the analysis of the automatic measurement data, but also enable the manual input of measurement and observational data by groundspeople to create a rich dataset for assessing the health and maintenance requirements of playing surfaces.
Furthermore, to assist STRI's turf consultancy teams, the web-platform was programmed with intelligence to provide automated assessments of turf quality to enable the rapid identification of sports surfaces that require additional treatment or damage mitigation measures through STRI's support and consultancy services.
