Bees & Golf: An Unlikely Yet Impactful Partnership

Abstract

Protecting Pollinators and Changing an Industry With over 200,000 diverse species, pollinators are keystone organisms in nearly every ecosystem. They provide essential ecosystem services that provide direct and indirect benefits, including pollinating 35% of our food crops and 94% of flowering plants. Despite their contributions to the environment and humans, pollinator populations are declining worldwide due to various anthropogenic causes like land use change and pesticide use. A multi-faceted approach must be taken in order to reverse this decline and maintain the valuable diversity and services provided by pollinators. Golf courses represent an enormous green space land cover (2 million acres in the United State alone) that already provides important natural retreats and ecosystem services, especially in urbanized landscapes, but have a largely untapped potential to support pollinators. Many courses are beginning to move from resource-intense management toward more sustainable practices, but key challenges to improve habitats for pollinators on golf courses remain. There is a lack of awareness surrounding the myriad of ecological and socioeconomic benefits of supporting honeybees and other pollinators on golf courses, and insufficient guidance on where and how to actually implement pollinator habitat. In order to protect, promote, and propagate pollinators on golf courses, we address these challenges directly through three interrelated approaches: 1) Document the history and shift in golf course practices and provide golf course managers with actionable rationale and strategies to identify and convert underutilized managed areas into lower maintenance areas, as a step towards more sustainable land use, potential pollinator habitat, and even cost reduction. 2) Describe the menu of pollinator habitat options on a golf course (from honey-producing apiaries to formal and informal gardens), with guidance on how to recognize and assess the ecological and social benefits that these provide and easy ways to communicate and celebrate these benefits. 3) Design and build a multifunctional demonstration pollinator garden on a golf course, documenting every step in the process in a way that it can be applied at any site. 1) Identify Underutilized Areas on Golf Courses Our review of the history and current practices on golf courses makes it clear that high-intensity maintenance does not need to be the norm. Golf has a long-standing connection with nature, but many factors, from war chemicals to televising the sport, has led to the intensification of management. We provide evidence through both quantitative research across courses and case studies outlining golf courses that are now part of a shift toward more sustainable practices. To provide specific guidance on how a course can become a part of this shift, we focus on one relatively simple management action: converting managed underutilized areas on a golf course into lower maintenance areas. There are two main methods to identify underutilized areas on a course that we outline in detail: 1. Observing the course and recording where people regularly go, and 2. Utilizing the DEACON tool from The United States Golf Association (USGA) to map golfers and cart routes. Bees & Golf: An Unlikely Yet Impactful Partnership University of Michigan SEAS 2023 I We demonstrate how using the DEACON tool can also allow managers to actually quantify the benefits of reducing the maintenance level of underutilized areas. These include reducing both water and chemical (fertilizer and pesticide usage), which lowers maintenance and labor costs and has the potential to provide safe ecosystem services and habitat for wildlife and pollinators. 2) Choose from a Menu of Pollinator Habitat Options for Golf Courses and Recognize and Share their Benefits Depending on how they are managed, the different components and acreage of golf courses can serve as safe havens for pollinator species, providing them with resources such as food, water, and shelter. We developed a menu of options for implementing pollinator habitat on courses that allow facilities to choose from a suite of interventions that best suit their specific wants, needs, and individual circumstances: 1. Mixed Species Rough 2. Unmowed Naturalized Area With Wildflowers 3. Formalized Native Pollinator Garden, and 4. Apiaries in Naturalized Areas. We further document that creating any type of pollinator habitat on golf courses is not only key to sustaining healthy pollinator populations, but can also provide numerous additional benefits for the golf course and local community, including: • Improved On-Site Safety • Reduced Maintenance Costs and Labor • Unique Branding and Sales • Positive Player Experience and Health • Community Engagement and Educational Opportunities • Large-Scale Impact on Food and Water Systems 3) Design and Implement a Pollinator Garden To provide both actionable guidance and a specific demonstration of how a golf course can incorporate pollinator habitat we developed a set-by-step guide for designing and implementing a multifunctional pollinator garden that equally meets the needs of key end users. Based on scientific research and previous knowledge, we outline the process in terms of the following steps: 1. Establishing Project Goals and Parameters - key visions or desired outcomes, plus any budget or timeline needs 2. Site Analysis - assess physical site features that will affect design 3. Choosing Design Style and Aesthetic - such as a formal or informal garden design 4. Develop a Multifunctional Plant Palette and Design - choose the plants and layout that simultaneously meet the needs of three key end users: • Pollinators • Golfers and visitors Management and maintenance staff

5. Design Within a Budget - strategies for designing within different budgets 6. Communicate the Design - using visuals to communicate ideas 7. Implement the Garden - planning for the day, organizing volunteer events and follow up after the garden has been completed We then apply all the steps to illustrate a real-world case of designing and implementing a highquality multifunctional pollinator garden in Goat Hill Park golf course in Oceanside, California. We recommend that all the knowledge and guidance we have gathered be used to inform golf courses on why and how they can become valuable pollinator habitat sites, while also improving golfer experience and overall function and longevity of their course.