Turfgrass in the Ryukyu Islands: report on the special lecture at Ocean Expo Park

Just before typhoon #15, I traveled to Okinawa to deliver a lecture about Turfgrass in the Ryukyu Islands at Ocean Expo Park. And despite the approaching typhoon – now passing Okinawa with winds over 130 miles per hour and with waves 50 feet high – there were 101 people in attendance in a packed room to hear about the turfgrasses of these islands, what makes this such a challenging place to produce good turfgrass (low photosynthetic irradiance), and the four steps that one can implement to optimize turfgrass performance under these conditions. 

And people came not just from Okinawa, but also from Osaka, and from Nagano, from golf courses, city councils, landscape designers, engineers, agricultural scientists, to learn about turfgrass management in this part of Japan.

One of the things that was discussed was the climate, and I showed the climatological normals data for Naha and Ishigaki, comparing those cities to other cities where warm-season grasses are grown and demonstrating that there is less sunshine here, therefore making bermudagrass, with its high light requirement, a difficult grass to maintain in these conditions, with manilagrass, or St. Augustine grass, or broadleaf carptegrass, producing a better turf under the reduced irradiance of these islands. The presentation slides are available for download as a PDF here (14 MB).

I also prepared a handout for the lecture, and it is available for download here, also as a PDF file (600 KB).

Of course, with any lecture of this type, I am indebted to the translators, and Ocean Expo Park has excellent staff who translated the handout into Japanese, translated my lecture, and served as amazing hosts for my stay at Okinawa. We had a great time, and I’m looking forward to my next visit to Okinawa.