What was it all about?

Natural turfgrass offers a number of significant environmental benefits, including the ability to cool urban landscapes, sequester carbon, prevent erosion and improve air quality.

This project was conducted in 2013/14 to develop a new method of identifying and quantifying turfgrass cover in urban areas.

Following a literature review of possible methods, researchers chose the i‐Tree Canopy online program to use in combination with Google Earth to map suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne and assess turf type and coverage.  The technique successfully surveyed 32 suburbs in all and found that turfgrass coverage decreased substantially in built up areas with high density living, in both cities.

While the findings are not surprising, the study showed that the method is capable of capturing data to help decision-makers regarding where turfgrass would be of benefit for city dwellers.