Analysis of Water and Landscape Best Management Practice Impacts on Water Quality on Golf Courses

Golf courses use fertilizers, pesticides, and other landscape management techniques that can lead to impaired surface water and groundwater quality. Audubon International’s Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program (ACSP) for Golf Courses can help to address these issues. As part of the ACSP, participating golf courses collect both qualitative and quantitative data about the courses’ water systems. This project is the first attempt to organize and analyze this complex and mixed format dataset associated with U.S. golf courses. The specific research objectives were to manually extract meaningful and consistent data from the many hundreds of data files provided, provide data analyses associated with said data to the greatest extent possible, and make recommendations about ways to improve future ACSP data collection. Research partner: Audubon International. Published in 2021.