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Cultivar blends: A strategy for creating more resilient warm season turfgrass lawns

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Abstract

Turfgrass lawns are synonymous with plant selection in the built environment. Plants in urban landscapes are largely selected to enhance aesthetic quality and comply with social norms. Warm season turfgrasses are produced and planted as intraspecific cultivar monocultures to preserve heritable traits that meet aesthetic standards. Monocultures are less resilient to biotic and abiotic stress than more diverse plantings, which increases reliance on pesticides and resource-intensive maintenance and presents unintended environmental risks. Increasing interspecific plant diversity may provide the greatest resilience benefits, but it introduces production, maintenance, and marketing barriers that can inhibit industry and consumer acceptance. Intraspecific cultivar blends may provide plant diversity resilience benefits without compromising industry and consumer values. Using a four-year field experiment we determined the effects of mixing warm season turfgrass cultivars on lawn resilience and aesthetic quality. We find that mixing turfgrass cultivars increases quality compared to cultivar monocultures, but primarily when a poorly performing cultivar is present. Mixtures of four cultivars containing the poorly performing cultivar averaged 42% greater plant cover and 33% greater aesthetic quality than monocultures of that cultivar, indicating that the other cultivars compensated for the loss of one from the stand. Three years after planting, perceived aesthetic quality of lawns by turfgrass industry professionals was above the minimum aesthetic threshold only for plots containing blends of four cultivars. Thus, our results suggest that mixing warm season turfgrass cultivars extends the longevity of turfgrass coverage and quality compared to conventional cultivar monocultures. Such benefits can reduce monetary, natural resource, and pesticide inputs without conflicting with social aesthetic norms and may be a ready-made approach to more sustainable lawns in urban greenspaces.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Mark Kann, Chris Green, and Jeremy Hall at the UF/IFAS Plant Science Research and Education Unit for their critical assistance with field plot maintenance. We thank Joseph Guiliano for capturing aerial images of field plots. Kevin Kenworthy provided valuable insight and guidance on cultivar selection and sourcing. Nicole Benda, Ava Joy Cockey, Lauren Dana, Tanner Felbinger, Kelly Laplante, Rebecca Perry, James Pinkney, Natasha Restuccia, Paul Ruppert, and Kendall Stacey provided valuable assistance with planting, data collection, image analyses, and field surveys. We thank Bethel Farms and JB Farms for providing St. Augustinegrass plant material. This work was funded by grants from the Florida Nursery Growers and Landscape Association to AGD and JKK, the University of Florida IFAS Experiment Station to AGD and BVI, and USDA-NIFA award 2018-70006-28931 to AGD, BVI, and JBU.

Funding

This work was funded by grants from the Florida Nursery Growers and Landscape Association to AGD and JKK, the University of Florida IFAS Experiment Station to AGD and BVI, and USDA-NIFA award 2018–70006-28931 to AGD, BVI, and JBU.

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Brianna Whitman: Methodology; Investigation; Formal analysis; Writing-original draft; Writing-review & editing. Basil V. Iannone III: Methodology; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Writing-review & editing. Jason K. Kruse: Methodology; Resources; Funding acquisition; Writing-review & editing. J. Bryan Unruh: Methodology; Funding acquisition; Writing-review & editing. Adam G. Dale: Conceptualization; Methodology; Formal analysis; Resources; Writing-original draft; Writing-review & editing; Supervision; Project administration; Funding acquisition.

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Correspondence to Adam G. Dale.

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Whitman, B., Iannone, B.V., Kruse, J.K. et al. Cultivar blends: A strategy for creating more resilient warm season turfgrass lawns. Urban Ecosyst 25, 797–810 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-021-01195-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-021-01195-3

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