The golf and turfgrass industry, like other land-based industries, has to take responsibility for sustainable societal development, i.e. produce golf courses and other turfgrass areas of a high standard while at the same time ensuring the sustainable use of natural resources and contributing to functioning ecosystems.
The aim of STERF is to support R&D that can help the golf industry to fulfil these ambitions. The activities of STERF should lead to improvements in the quality of golf courses, as well as economic and environmental gains for the industry and society as a whole.
The strategic objectives for STERF-funded R&D activities are that:
It is apparent that the golf and turfgrass industry faces a number of local and international challenges, all of which will need concerted and collective solutions, underpinned by robust, applied science. To meet the challenges the sector has to face STERF has created four international and trans-disciplinary R&D sub-programmes, including:
Progress in these programme areas will ccollectively lead to improvements in the quality of managed turfgrass areas as well as economic and environmental gains for the industry. The key objectives of the programmes are to coordinate design and running of R&D activities, and to manage the eeffective dissemination of outputs (new knowledge) through channels and formats which are easily accessible to end-users. STERF shall play a key role expanding the programmes on an international level.
STERF is a research foundation that supports existing and future R&D efforts and delivers ‘ready-to-use research results’ that benefit the Nordic golf sector. STERF was set up in 2006 by the golf federations in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland and the Nordic Greenkeepers’ Associations.