Turfgrass Science
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| C-5 Activities at Baltimore, MD The Agronomy / Crop Science / Soil Science Annual Meeting at Baltimore, MD from Oct. 18 - 23 was very busy for C-5 members. In fact, it was maybe too busy for many people. The C-5 Division had so many papers' often in concurrent sessions, it was difficult to cover everything, and even more difficult to find time to enjoy the pleasant setting of The Inner Harbor of Baltimore. Those C-5 members unable to join us this year I encourage to plan now for the meetings in Salt Lake City, UT from Oct. 31 to Nov. 4, 1999. This year's meeting included a NTEP Workshop on Saturday, Oct. 17. This workshop was in very hot demand with only 40 participants and 60 people on the waiting list. We had discussions with Kevin Morris, NTEP Executive Director, about doing this Workshop again next year due to the large number of people on the waiting list. At this time he believes it may be more appropriate to develop regional workshops, perhaps in conjunction with our regional meetings, such as WRCC-11. Anyone interested in pursuing this or any other NTEP concern is urged to contact Kevin. A significant amount of data was gathered at this Workshop and we look forward to a future paper or presentation on this. The Turf Tour was held on Sunday, Oct. 18 and was also a sellout. First, the Tour participants visited Camden Yards, where the Orioles play on a Kentucky bluegrass/perennial ryegrass field installed over one of the older PAT systems. The next stop was the Ravens field which is Sportsgrass, with GN- 1 bermudagrass and perennial ryegrass. We were shown a cutaway section of the system, the computer controls and the heating tubes and listened to the strengths and weaknesses of the field. The final stop was Queenstown Harbor Golf Links where we discussed the seven-year permitting process and the monitoring of the groundwater that has gone |
on at this site. The drastic drops in nitrates at this site after conversion from row crops to turf help support the environmental friendliness of turf. The weather was perfect for the tour and the views from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge made us all want to go sailing. (Check out C-5 Web page for pictures) Planning for next year's tour has already started, with interest expressed by other divisions in perhaps a joint tour. We will have to see how the planning goes but we hope to have a tour dealing with drought issues to take advantage of the location. One hundred fifty-one volunteered papers were submitted for presentation in the C-5 Division this year, surpassing the previous record of 129 presentations in St. Louis. Of this total, 56 poster papers were presented in 4 sessions, and 95 oral presentations were given in 9 sessions. If you look at these numbers you see a couple of reasons we ended up with so many concurrent sessions. One is that only 37% of the papers were given as posters. If you remember the society goal is to have at least 50tYo of the papers presented as posters. Next year look at your paper and seriously consider whether it could be presented just as well as a poster. For my part I may try to schedule many concurrent poster sessions, and not have a conflicting oral session. This would attract more people down to the poster sessions at one time so we could more thoroughly examine these papers. One of our C-5 colleagues suggested we should limit oral presentations to the Graduate Student Paper Contest and our symposia. I currently do not want to go that far but we should think how to best organize our time.The other reason for so many conflicts is just the number of papers presented by very active members. Our members also are not as narrowly focused as other divisions so we end up wanting to cover many areas. |
| C-5 and CSSA Business The C-5 Business Meeting on Tuesday afternoon was attended by at least 150 members. I would like to thank the C-5 members for their enthusiastic support of the Division and the Society. It always feels good for the Chair of C-5 to go to the Board Meeting with the other Divisions announcing 25 to 40 members at their Business Meetings, while we have 5 times that number. The Crop Science Society had two major decisions that were to be voted on by every division and returned to the Board Meeting on Thursday afternoon. The first dealt with the organization of the Tri-Societies as we separated membership in the Agronomy Society from membership in CSSA or SSSA and membership overall with journal subscriptions. A variety of Models were presented to the Divisions and at a Town Hall Meeting on Tuesday evening. The Board of CSSA voted to stay with the current Model 1. IA, rather than switch to Model 3 where we lost representation on the Agronomy Board. The overall results of the three Societies will be announced later. The other important issue dealt with reinstating publication charges for the Crop Science Journal after 6 pages and having page charges of $25.00/page for non-members. Our Division was comfortable with this decision but it was rejected by the majority of the other Divisions. The Executive Committee will reexamine the options. One division suggested adding a uniform fee of $100/paper published. The purpose of this money is to make up a deficit in the Journal and to help with an overall deficit of the Society. Some members of other Divisions thought if everyone cut their papers back to 6 pages the original decision may not help the Society financially. Additional concerns dealt with making the Journal too expensive to publish in by nonmembers from developing nations and competition for the best papers with Journals that do not charge authors. Some of C-5 members expressed concern that additional fees for membership or subscriptions came out of their pockets while publication charges or page charges came from their projects. Increasing membership may help solve some of these problems. All of us need to think how we might help increase membership and publication. Retention of graduate students as members is one |
concern. As a Division we might think how to involve more foreign members who belong to ITS so they become members and publish in Crop Science. We will hear more of this later.
Special publications are often money-losing propositions for the Society. In order to make them more current and saleable the editorial board will be upholding the By-Laws strictly and may refuse to publish some special publications with limited audience. If you are planning to publish a Symposia the rules are as follows. 1.) The initial copy of the paper must be into Headquarters one month before the Symposia so reviews can be done. 2.) The final copy should be back in 60 days after. Symposia can also be published as a group in Crop Science. This is usually managed by the Symposia organizers through Crop Science.
Division C-6 requested and received approval to change its name to Forage and Grazing Lands to more properly represent its membership. The change created a hole for Grain Quality papers that had previously appeared in this section of Crop Science. C-6 is going to look at pursuing an editorial policy similar to C-5 so they do not get their papers rejected because animals are mentioned (I guess this has happened more than once).
C-5 Program Planning for Salt Lake City I want to get an early start on this partially to get feedback from the C-5 members on some ideas that have been presented to make next year's program even better (do not assume it is someone else's responsibility, let me know what you think either positive or negative). I am increasingly busy and I need to get things started as soon as possible.Ideas that have been presented include: 2. If most of us are coming in on Saturday perhaps we could move some of our side meetings into Saturday evening so we would not feel everything had to be packed into Sunday evening through Tuesday evening. I know by the time I finished all my other meetings I was exhausted on Tuesday. The other option is to |
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stick it out until Thursday to get things done.
3. The Weed and PGR sessions have been on Thursday the last four years. They desire moving to another day since they do not like playing to the small crowds.We are required by the Society to equally fill up every day and can not start doing concurrent sessions until all days are utilized.lt may make sense to establish a rotation for that fourth day, unless we fund another way to hold the audience. 4. No other sessions can be planned at the same time we have Symposia where we have the lead. Usually we have our Monday Evening Program and one Symposia, with the Extension Roundtable on Sunday Evening. The addition of one Symposia this year helped constrict our times for other sessions. The Symposia Committee has already come up with some excellent suggestions for Salt Lake City. Other Divisions showed sign)ficant interest in many of our suggestions. The overall Society expressed interest in how each Division may be influenced by the FQPA. This issues definitely cuts across and may become a Plenary Session. S-3 (Soil Microbiology) has expressed interest in cosponsoring a Symposia on Turf Soil Innoculants, Reality and Promises. It may be useful to involve some of their experts. 5. As I mentioned above I have considered trying to have just one or two concurrent poster sessions, with no concurrent oral papers. I also had requests to limit the number of hours authors had to stand with their posters, especially if they were missing two concurrent oral sessions. 6. We are trying a new model for our Division with the Chair-elect helping in the coordination of the Committees. To permanently make this change we would need to change our By-Laws. I think it may be best to try it out for a year or so first. We usually encourage all committees to meet during the meeting, and I know many did. However, with email Committees can do a sign)ficant amount of work between meetings. In addition, our Chair-elect, Jeff Nus, is in charge of the Divisional Poster for the next meeting. I prepared the one this year and I am sure Jeff would appreciate input into what people would like on this. Standing Committees (Currently listed. Some individuals were scheduled to complete their terms this year or last year. Any one scheduled to end assignments can elect to continue or help me |
to identify new members. We have had some volunteers.We also need to know who is currently chair.) Below is the current listings I have for Committees. Please let Jeff and I know any changes.
Education: Robert N. Carrow (GA) - 98 - Chair Ron R. Duncan (GA) - 99 Michael Goatley (MS) - 97 Grady L. Miller (FL) - 98 Eric Miltner (WA) - 97 Paul G. Johnson (UT) - 99 Special Symposia: Bridget Ruemmele (Rl) - 99- Co- Chair Peter Landschoot (PA) - 99 - Co- Chair Bruce Clark (NJ) - 99 Gwen Stahnke (WA),(PA), (NZ) - 00 Frank Rossi (NY) - 00 Marty Petrovic (NY) - 00 Rob Golumbiewski (MT) - 00 Charlie Mancino (PA) - 00 Evening Program: Frank Rossi (NY) - 99 - Chair Jennifer Johnson-Cicalese (NJ) - 98 Mike Kenna (USGA) - 98 Wayne Kussow (WI) - 99 James Murphy (NJ) - 97 Awards & Professional Advancement: Keith Karnok (GA) - 98 -Chair Jeff Krans (MS) -98 Clark Throssell (IN) -99 (Volunteers??) Contemporary Issues: Jeff Nus (GCSAA) - Chair Robert Sherman (NE) George Hamilton (PA) Haibo Liu (KY) Richard Rathjens (Davey) J. Brian Unruh (FL) Extension: Peter Landschoot (PA) - 98 David Chalmers (VA) Ali Harivandi (CA) David Kopec (AZ) - 99 - Chair Dennis Martin (OK) - 99 - Chair Tom Voight (IL) Gwen Stahnke (WA), (PA), (NZ) Gene R. Taylor (TX) |
| Ad Hoc Committees (some have been proposed for Standing which requires By-law changes)
Web Page: Tom Fermanian (IL) - Chair (Great Job) David Chalmers (VA) Roch Gaussoin (NE) Zac Reicher (IN) Gwen Stahnke (WA), (PA), (NZ) Turf Directory: (Buy your copies) Keith Karnok (GA) - Editor and Chair Tom Fermanian (IL) Jim McCrimmon (LA) Slide Monograph: Keith Karnok (GA) - Chair (Keeping us all on track) Wayne Morgan (CA) Theme for 1999 ASA-CSSA-SSSA Meeting: Science Serving Agriculture and Natural Resources: Present and Future Keep this theme in mind as you design symposia for the meetings. C-5 Web Page Tom Fermanian and the Web Page Committee have done an excellent job getting the web page up and running. You can access it either through the Crop Science Web Page at www.crops.org (pull down menu to select Division C-5) or directly at www.turf.uiuc.edu/C5/CShome.html. The page is very useful with addresses and direct links for email of members. It has other good links including ITS and the Newsletter. I have already found it very useful. There was some concern expressed by Headquarters about our listing of C-5 members addresses and email on the page. If anyone objects to having their name, address or email on this please let Tom or I know. If we need to change this due to membership concern we will keep you informed. Thanks, Tom. |
Golf Tournament for Salt Lake City Dr. Mike Casler, Wisconsin, with the assistance of Dr. David Huff, Pennsylvania, are attempting to organize a Scramble Golf Tournament to be held on Saturday. Mike Casler organized one before our Grass Breeders Workshop in Wisconsin and those who participated had a great time. This first time round they envision it not being an official ASA or CSSA event, just a bunch of agronomists, crop scientists, and soil scientists who enjoy golf (or might enjoy it if they had time) coming together for some fun. Mike envisions Registration Forms going out to at least the C-5 membership in the spring after they identify a course. I believe we would be responsible for our organizing our own teams. Mike is a gorage grass breeder doing some turf breeding now (we gradually get most of them converted). He has also been helping with the Statistical Committee of NTEP. Graduate Paper and Poster Competitions Paper Competition 1st Place: Laurie E. Trenholm, Univ. of Georgia 2nd Place: Cale A. Bigelow, North Carolina State 3rd Place: Lane P. Tredway, Rutgers University Poster Competition 1st Place: Lane P. Tredway, Rutgers University 2nd Place: X. Liu, Kansas State University 3rd Place: David J. Cirata, Ohio State University |