What are the main challenges and opportunities for golf course water quality in the era of climate change?

I have seen course cut out a lot of roughs from their courses and made turn them into areas where plants that are drought resistant are planted. Makes the course more challenging for the players to keep their balls into play but it keeps the water for the greens.

1/ A water Management plan is a good start. That is megalitres required per year per hectare per area watered. This of course INCLUDES rainfall. 2/ Then beware of the volume of water available. This could be storage, supplied pumped. Also consider RAINFALL as a percentile here. Rainfall available from the 5th to 90th percentile. Medium rainfall maybe considered – but the MEAN is better. 3/ Application efficiency: Is my system applying a uniform application. A 60% DU/CU you add and extra (approximately) 40 - 50% more than needed. 4/ Soil Water holding Capacity: Applying enough water to the plant root depth. 5/ Learning how to estimate plant (soil) water use (or I prefer loss). 6/ Revisit and improve on your own learning curves My obs

This will become more accepted as operators educate players that brown is the new green at certain times of the year. The Masters course is the pinnacle of everything having to be green from wall to wall. Pine hurst has painted a different picture with brown roughs. And if it was not for the camera filters at PGA events, we would see more brown. And the average golfer would look forward to playing with brown areas. The operators have to lead this movement. They are the key ones with the investment to protect and grow. It is a steep challenge hill.

Dry fairways run further for the average suffer. Here we have players who love our summer-brown fairways that support their unusual 250 yard drives ( 175 yards of drive and 75 yards of roll). But there are golf purists who feel every inch of every fairway has to be green and this comes with lots of water and nutrients. Back to golfer education to make brown the new green and the super will not have to water and feed the plants to extend to have them survive as green through tough summer conditions. The plants will come back in the cooler Fall times. The question - what are acceptable playing conditions?? And if you shoot over 100 (as 90% of golfers are known to do) then brown on the edges should be welcomed.

We wonder what would happen if every course had access only to rainfall and collector ponds. It would still divert flow from downstream but would not pull water from steams and wells. It would make us use more hearty grasses and reduce the fairway sizes. Controversial but doable. And the hole would still be the same size as it is now for the final putt.