Transcript

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00
Hello everybody, and welcome to We Measure The World, a podcast produced by scientists, for scientists…

KATIE ANSELMI 0:07
imagine if your front lawn was broadcasted on national television. That’s what they have to do, right? That’s their job. And so for us, a lot of it is when we both install those sensors, and then when we’re taking the mobile sensor readings across the field. Our field manager at BYU, he manages that field within two to three percentage so he understands how the field drains weather stations on site, so we can get the best and most accurate data when it comes to precipitation. So he understands all of the inputs and the irrigation factors, and he’s got it down to a science, and then the sensors end up backing him up on his practices.

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:46
That’s just a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure The World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil, plant, atmosphere, continuum, and today’s guest joining us again is Katie Anselmi, just as a refresher, or for those who haven’t heard our previous interview with Katie, Katie completed her bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science and Technology at Colorado Mesa University, where she focused her studies on water quality and conservation. She just recently completed her master’s degree in Environmental Science at Brigham Young University, specializing in soil physics and soil chemistry, and before she steps back into academia to pursue a PhD, she is currently working as a project surveyor and drone specialist for a civil engineering firm based out of Utah. She is also a member of the first cohort of recipients of the Gaylon Campbell fellowship awarded by METER Group for innovation in environmental measurement, and today, she’s here to talk to us about a topic slightly different than last time her research utilizing drone imagery and other sensing tools to examine and improve the performance of natural turf fields. So Katie, thank you so much for being here again.

KATIE ANSELMI 1:59
Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be back.

BRAD NEWBOLD 2:02
In the last episode, we talked about your general background and where you came from and how you got into the field that you are, but what led you specifically to focus on sports turf management and I guess, the use of environmental technologies in that field?

KATIE ANSELMI 2:17
Yeah, definitely that wasn’t something that I really got into until I ended up at BYU. BYU has a lot of natural turf, football, softball and soccer are all natural turf right now. And Dr Brian Hopkins is one of the leading natural turf researchers in the country, and he’s based out of there. And it was one of those things where funding, we had the funding, and I know that METER was interested in kind of breaking into that market, and so they had the sensors, and we already had some sensors installed on the stadium at Lavelle Edwards, and we just wanted to do more research with that data that we were getting. So it was kind of a need, and then it was kind of a funding thing, and then it was kind of definitely an interest. You know, I grew up playing sports. I love watching sports, especially football. So when they said, Hey, do you want to work on football? Do you want to work on natural turf fields? I said, Absolutely.

BRAD NEWBOLD 3:10
What were your sports growing up?

KATIE ANSELMI 3:12
So I played lacrosse, yeah, and I loved watching football with the family. So.

BRAD NEWBOLD 3:18
Cool, cool. I don’t think we get too many lacrosse players out this way.

KATIE ANSELMI 3:22
Yeah, it’s big from Denver, so cool. It was lacrosse and rugby. So in both of those, I always preferred to play on natural turf. Yeah, so.

BRAD NEWBOLD 3:30
Yeah, definitely. All right, we wanted to congratulate you on being one of the inaugural recipients of the Gaylon Campbell fellowship. Can you tell us a little bit about how you first heard about it, and your general thoughts on being part of the program?

KATIE ANSELMI 3:43
Yeah, definitely. So when I was applying to BYU, my advisor that I had chosen, Dr Neil Hansen, he was looking for different ways to fund me, and he said that I could apply to this fellowship to potentially receive funding and be able to go to BYU. And so it was kind of through him and his connections with METER. I know he’s done a podcast with you guys as well. He was the one that kind of pushed me in that direction, and he was there when I did the interview. And yeah, so it was really thanks to him that I’m here.

BRAD NEWBOLD 4:11
Nice so as part of the fellowship, it’s about using instrumentation to make meaningful environmental change. So can you describe a little bit about what was involved in your research within the fellowship.

KATIE ANSELMI 4:25
Yeah, definitely. I think the greatest part about the fellowship is being able to see how these sensors are created, you know, from when they’re just ideas on a on a board, to actually being manufactured and put together in the room back there. So they hadn’t even really hit the market yet. So that was really cool, because we were able to actually be the ones to install these sensors onto some natural turf fields. And we were doing two different projects, but one of them was very much soil physics and chemistry based, where we were looking to see if we apply fertilizer to these sensors. Are they able to react and show the differences in electrical conductivity based off of fertilizer application. It was challenging, because these hadn’t hit the market, and they were kind of new. So we had a bunch of setbacks. It was we were helping METER work through the kinks, because we were one of the first people outside of the company that was actually using these products in field. And then on the other side of it, when we were doing research on the stadium, we were working more with the TEROS 12’s. We have all these sports field managers. They have really stressful, intense jobs. They don’t have a lot of time. How can we use the technology that we have and create different protocols to where they can collect data right before game? You know? So it was kind of METER would give us the materials and kind of their idea of, maybe you could do this, or we’ve, we’ve kind of been looking into this avenue, and then it was our job, as researchers and at BYU to come up with a project and kind of see it through.

BRAD NEWBOLD 5:54
Yeah. And as any product development team will will say that beta testing, that real world testing is is imperative to getting a good product out there and making sure it works correctly.

KATIE ANSELMI 6:05
Yeah, and you’re to the point where you’re getting into the nitty gritty, you know, equations that go into these sensors, and how the raw data is collected, and then how the sensor takes that and ends up putting it through the equations and then into the database. So that was really cool. I know a lot about soil sensors because you have to know a lot about them when things are going not right, you know when things need to be worked on? That’s when you really have to understand how everything works, versus when everything is working. You don’t really tend to think about it so well.

BRAD NEWBOLD 6:36
That’s cool that you got to get that kind of hands on during that product development process, and be able to be a part of that process and have your input and insight into what you’re seeing in the ground.

KATIE ANSELMI 6:46
Yeah, yeah. And the fellowship was really cool, because when I came out here last summer, I was able to, you know, sit with Colin and sit with Paulo and actually work through people who are experts in this, you know, like, that’s what they do, is they make sensors. And so I was able to kind of see behind the curtain into all of the different factors, and even, you know, sitting with the guys who are doing the coding and looking through all of this different code, it gave me a much better sense of how these sensors work.

BRAD NEWBOLD 7:11
It’s an amazing process we have. I’m not going to toot our own horn here, but we do have a lot of really, really amazing people that are working.

KATIE ANSELMI 7:19
Yeah, you really do.

BRAD NEWBOLD 7:19
Yeah, top notch folks here, let’s dig into your research there in sports turf fields. Could you just describe a little bit about your main goals for your research project, and how you’re blending the environmental measuring, you know, and turf management? You did mention that that these turf managers, they’re super busy, right? And so just trying to find a way to help them streamline their processes and helping turf perform better?

KATIE ANSELMI 7:47
Yeah, definitely. So my thesis had two chapters. One of them was a little more principle based, you know, we were talking about, if we’re applying this amount of fertilizer, right? And fertilizer nutrients are basically just salts right in the soil. And so the the way that the sensor works is, when it gives the moisture content output, it also will give the electrical conductivity output. And at that point, both on the agricultural and then definitely the sports field side, we weren’t really using the electrical output for anything, the electrical conductivity output. And so our idea was, if we’re applying different levels of fertilizer to a turf field, are we able to see maybe we were trying to develop a range of electrical conductivity to where a sports field manager could look at his sensors, see the electrical conductivity range and say, Okay, this is good. And it’s important to point out this works with constructed sports fields because of the nature of the soil composition, right? Because, unlike a natural sports field that is not constructed somewhere like Lavelle Edwards, is sand based, right? And so because of that sand, and because of the way that the water moves through the sand and moves much more quickly, there isn’t as much water holding and so we get a better understanding of what nutrients are in there, because there isn’t a lot of baseline nutrients that are just existing within the soil, right? So that was the first part. That was my first chapter. And my second chapter was a little more, maybe case study application based. We were actually working with the field manager of Laval Edwards stadium, that’s BYU football, Dustin pixton, and we said, Okay, we have this technology. We want to be able to give you the best understanding of what does the field look like at kickoff, right? So he got us down there. We would be down there an hour and a half before kick off, right? Taking measurements we took 50 points across the field, and we measured moisture content, so how wet or dry the field is. We measured there’s a measurement called the clegg hammer, which pretty much indicates how hard or soft the field is, kind of an impaction test. And then we took the temperature of the field, which became important as the season went on, you know, and that background started to freeze. And then we took a couple readings called the shear strength measure. Which is pretty much, how does an athlete’s foot interact with the root base, you know, so as an athlete’s foot with a cleat is coming down and turning, is that root zone providing enough pressure or feedback to where it’s actually the ground that’s absorbing the impact, then not an athlete’s joints? So, you know, ankles, knees and hips. So that was kind of the other part of our project. It was very much us working with Dustin and saying, How can we get this data to you so that we can make maps? So that’s what we did, is we took the 50 points with all of that data, and then we used geospatial statistics to actually create a map and say, Okay, these are kind of some of the spots that are a little harder, a little softer, a little wetter, a little drier, because there’s kind of this idea that’s developed within the sports field research industry, which is that an athlete’s injury, so a non contact injury, right? So that’s tearing a ligament is going to happen within the transition between two zones. So we call those a transition zone or a transition margin. So where, if the whole field is a little bit wetter or a little bit drier or a little bit harder, a little bit softer, an athlete isn’t going to notice as they’re running across the field, and their body will naturally acclimate to kind of one condition or another, right within a range. But if there is a place where it’s a lot harder or a lot softer, and an athlete is running through that transition zone, then they’re more likely to, you know, experience a ligament tear or a slip or a fall, something like that, right? Does that make sense? Totally, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s kind of what we were looking at, is we were seeing if we can take this data, and the idea is we really wanted to make it time friendly, so that if a sports field manager wanted to apply this practice to their management field, they could have their team go out there, say, an hour before the game, take these measurements, do just a basic statistical analysis, and be able to identify, are there any points on this field that we can either visually see or use the data to identify that could be an issue to an athlete’s safety and playability.

BRAD NEWBOLD 12:08
That’s super cool. Yeah, I want to dig into this a whole bunch. We got a ton of questions. Yeah, so good. All right, let’s back it up a little bit. You mentioned you’re integrating soil sensors and various other sensors and measurements as well. What have you learned about the stress patterns you talked about, these built environments of the turf there? How does that, that irrigation, come into play, in trying to figure out when to irrigate, how much to irrigate, you know, all those things, especially if you’re dealing with playing time, how early before you know the game? Does that need to be done? And just kind of the the adjusting and trying to find that those those thresholds for optimal irrigation to provide, you know, turf health, as well as as being able to help the athletes perform their best. So yeah, long question, what have you learned about optimizing irrigation in that realm?

KATIE ANSELMI 12:56
I think the sensors, and this is kind of across the board when working with both farmers and field managers, but especially field managers. The sensors are a tool to kind of back up the practices that a lot of times, field managers are already implementing. Right? One of the things that I learned with this project is that field managers know their stuff right, and they know their field Imagine if your front lawn was broadcasted on national television. That’s what they have to do, right? That’s their job. And so for us, a lot of it is when we both install those sensors, and then when we’re taking the mobile sensor readings across the field and we’re getting back those percentages, our field manager at BYU, he manages that field within two to three percentage points, which is not a lot when you think of a football field, and all the variation of water content is between two to 3% but the thing is, like he knows and already has his pattern down. So he understands how the field drains, the weather stations on site, so we can get the best and most accurate data when it comes to precipitation. So he understands all of the inputs and the irrigation factors, and he’s got it down to a science, and then the sensors end up backing him up on his practices. And this, we actually found this to be super important, the idea of having the sensors installed in a field in order to back up a management practice, because a couple years ago, so not this past season. But the season before, there was a game where the field developed. There was dew that started to form on the field. It was a later game got a little cold, dew started to form on the top. BYU ended up losing that game. And BYU football actually got very mad at the manager, and he said, they said that you over watered the field, right? And so what the manager was able to do is he was able to actually go back through the data of the installed sensors. And he said, actually, like, here are the sensors that are installed at two inches, six inches and 12 inches. Here are the measurements at, you know, this game that you said, I over watered. Here are the measurements to the two previous games, and the water content was within one per. Percentage points of the other two games. So it ended up being a different issue, and it actually took a lot of heat and stress off of our field manager, because he was able to say, actually, I’m doing my job and we have data from these sensors to prove that.

BRAD NEWBOLD 15:15
That’s a really interesting case study there. Yeah, no, it’s really cool. So so along with that, the sports turf there at, we’re talking about Lavell Edwards stadium there at Brigham University, where they play their football games. I think I understand this correctly. It’s, is it a three layer deep? So there’s Kentucky Bluegrass, yes. And then sand and then gravel below that, yeah. And then you get into the natural the natural soil below that, is that correct?

KATIE ANSELMI 15:40
Or actually, below that, there’s actually going to be some drainage system, okay? Well, yeah, okay, yeah, of course, yeah, yeah. Hypothetically, there also could be, okay, natural, all right.

BRAD NEWBOLD 15:49
Can you talk to us about how these sensors were installed? Because you’re talking about at these various depths, and you’re dealing with probably around the root zone, in the sand, in the gravel. Is that how these sensors are installed, and then you also, you’re doing these point measurements before and after games and all that kind of stuff. Can you talk about a little bit the methodology about installing and taking these measurements in these various locations?

KATIE ANSELMI 16:12
Definitely. Yeah. So the installed sensors go back to the construction of the field, and I’m going to shout out Dr Brian Hopkins, because this is his baby. So this is what we call a perched water table, right? So you have the Kentucky Bluegrass, and then you have the sand, and then you have the gravel and that layering of the sand. And it’s not just any sand, it’s a very specifically specked sand that they have down there. And the way that it works is that the water is going to drain through the sand column, right, and then it’s going to stop and hold right before it hits the gravel, right until there’s enough water to actually push that holding through, and then it goes into the gravel and then drains out of the system. This is really important when it comes to water management, because you don’t want to over water right, because then you’re losing that water. But at the same time, there have been a couple torrential downpours that have happened before BYU games. And the idea with that is that this field is ready to play within 45 minutes to an hour of something like that happening, just because of the drainage. Because if there’s so much water going through, it, it’s ending up it’s going to drain a lot faster because that sand is going to allow it to go through. But then as soon as there’s not enough water to kind of push through that, that holding barrier between the sand and the gravel, then that water is going to hold so then going into, well, where did we install the sensors? Where we did you’re absolutely right. So that two inches is going to be kind of right, where the that main root zone is going to be, Kentucky Bluegrass, of course, can naturally root past two inches, but for us, we kind of wanted to see like, what’s happening almost right at the surface, and then that six inches in, that 12 inches is kind of going to see how is the water continuing to move down and holding right before it breaks into that gravel layer. And this was really interesting, because what we were able to identify is after a certain amount of years because of the different management practices such as like seeding and sanding on top of the field, which a field manager will do in order to keep the field level and to help with drainage and to apply seed, it ends up building up. So it isn’t just that 12 inches between the surface and the gravel anymore. It could be anywhere, you know, up to 16. And so what we were seeing is, as that sand continued to build, that perch, water table became less and less functional. So at the end, right before we redid the field, there was actually a dry point right in the middle where it would go wetter, kind of towards the surface, and then drier, and then wetter again. And looking at that data, that’s how we were able to identify that the perch table, water table, wasn’t working the way that it was constructed to and that it was kind of time to redo the field. And so we’re actually in the process of writing a paper that kind of identifies, kind of some of those layers over time, and identifying maybe what is a more precise or accurate idea of what a lifetime is for one of these constructed fields. That’s super cool. Yeah. And then so moving on to the the mobile sensing side of it, what we call proximal sensing. That was something that was pretty new. And the first kind of prototypes were developed at BYU. And then here we put a TEROS 12 on a broomstick right with a Bluetooth reader, and we were out on the on the field, the soccer field out there, and we were just taking spot measurements right, just kind of right within those three inches that the needle is able to reach. The idea with that is, how can we take more measurements across the field? Because one of the feedback that we get from the installed sensors is, well, there’s only two or three or four spots. You know, an installed sensor can only read so far because it’s installed. And so how do you know what’s going on with the rest of the field? And that’s where the mobile sensors kind of come into play. And since then, METER has gone through the whole process of developing the USGA sensor. Yeah.

KATIE ANSELMI 16:59
Yeah, yeah, the sensor we’re working with, yeah.

KATIE ANSELMI 17:19
The, the beginnings of that kind of came from us wanting to take these mobile sensor readings across a large area of fields at a more shallow depth.

BRAD NEWBOLD 18:07
I wanted to touch back on player performance and player health and safety as well. Since that was one of the big takeaways from your research there. Could you share, I guess, a couple more examples about how the research that you’re doing has informed the decision making when it comes to protecting players and allowing them to perform at their best?

KATIE ANSELMI 18:07
Yeah, definitely. I think it’s first just worth noting that the manager at Lavelle Edwards, he does his job so well, and so actually what we were seeing with the data is he manages that field to where it is extremely uniform. And part of my my thesis chapter was actually that idea of looking at uniformity, right? And so what we saw, because the field was new, because Dustin does such a good job, the field was actually pretty uniform. A couple of the things that we saw were things that we kind of already knew based off of the construction of the stadium itself, and then our data just backed that up. So an example is that, of course, there’s going to be a little more drainage on the side of the field right because of that just natural slope of the constructed fields, where it slopes down to the edges and that helps it drain. Another thing is, if anyone’s ever been to Lavelle Edwards, there’s a huge scoreboard on the south end of the field, right. And so as the season gets later, that sun tends to move more south. And so when you get to end of October, early November, and then later into the season, the south end of the field, from the 30 yard line down, gets no sun, and so it starts to freeze. So our last game, we saw with the data that the field was frozen solid through from the 30 yard line on down. And that’s something that you can kind of visually see, but it was really cool to have the data to back that up. And then, yeah, that was something that, you know, we tell BYU football, yeah. So actually, the south end of the field is frozen, just to kind of keep that in mind, you know, for athlete safety, I think this type of data would go and this research would come more into play for fields that are a little harder to manage, you know, or maybe managers that maybe don’t have as much experience, right? Because as you get more variation within the data, that’s when that variation starts to show up on a map, right? But even for us, there were some points that we were identify, Okay, this area of the field is a little drier, a little harder, a little softer throughout all of the games of the season, right? Because we did a spatial component, where we were looking at one game, and then we did a temporal component. We’re looking over multiple games. Are there spots that kind of show up as being higher or lower over the course of the season? And there were, it is worth noting that none of the issues that we’re seeing were out of the range that’s considered safe to play. All of our data was within safe to play for every single game of the 2024 season. And that’s just a testament to the management team that’s down there at BYU. But because they are experts in their field, they want to get that down to a science. They want to get those numbers into the exact range that they want to see them for optimal play and safety.

BRAD NEWBOLD 23:04
What is that that communication structure between the turf manager and say, for instance, the coaching staff? Do you have insight into that?

KATIE ANSELMI 23:13
I have a little bit of insight. My understanding is they won’t say anything unless there’s a huge issue. And it’s more just kind of like on the hindsight. They get feedback from the coaches after the game, so it isn’t so much before the game, before the game data is more. So, just for the reassurance of the field manager that everything’s out there looking great, you know, because field managers have a lot going on in their mind before a game. You know, not only do they have to make sure that the grass is healthy and safe to play on, they have to paint. They have to set up all of the nets. They have to set up their team. They have to manage everyone else who’s walking on the field, making sure that traffic on the field is kept to a minimum. So they have a lot of other things going on in their mind. So for us to be able to give them a map and say, This is what you think is going on, and this is actually what the data suggests, and most of the time those two connected pretty well. It was interesting. We did have one case, because the field is new, right? It was played last year was the first season we got new, new grass, right? And it was rolled out on sod. And what we actually came to find is that that sod was holding more water than we thought it would be. So we ended up getting readings that were high. They were in like the 30s. And so the field manager, he was, you know, drying the field, not watering as much, and it still was higher than he would like it to be. And so after the games, what we would do is we would go back and we would take measurements on the surface, and then right under that layer of sod, and what we ended up finding is that on the surface, it was a little wetter than he wanted it to be, and then right underneath that grass, it was exactly where he thought it was going to be. So that was really cool for our team to help him kind of identify that, oh, there’s something going on, and there’s things that managers can do to help with that water holding and to get the water to move through. But that isn’t necessarily something that he could have known just from um, looking at an installed sensor.

BRAD NEWBOLD 25:02
Was there any issues with differential flow or water holding capacity at like this, the seams of the sod? Did it knit together well enough that you didn’t really see any differences there?

KATIE ANSELMI 25:12
It did, it did knit together well enough. It’s funny that you mentioned that, because when we were we also flagged divots, just to kind of see where wear and tear on the field was happening. And some of the divots did end up happening between some of the seams, and at the time of play, you can’t even see the seams. The only time you can really see the seams was when we were looking at drone footage. You could kind of see a little difference in grass. So there were no issues that would make any concern for anyone who wasn’t looking at the field underneath a magnifying glass, like we were for this research.

BRAD NEWBOLD 25:43
You mentioned drone footage. Let’s talk about that. So a lot of cool stuff that you’re doing, could you just dig into the research you’re doing with aerial drone sensing and working at NDVI to measure the health of the turf?

KATIE ANSELMI 25:56
Yeah, this is a project that’s kind of currently in the works. We’re not even to the point where we’re ready to publish, but it’s an idea that we’re working with at BYU, which is the idea of, can we use AI and drone imagery to calculate the surface area of damaged natural turf after every game? And so what we would do is we would go out, we would take the images, we would process them, and then we would end up processing them with the multi spectral lens so that we could end up popping different colors within that multi spectral zone, so that we can see where the divots were. That’s kind of what we were doing, because in terms of NDVI, and this is another reading that we took with the data, it was pretty uniform, to the point where most of the time when we did our statistical analysis, it was just one green blog. But what we were end up doing is, of course, the NDVI is going to change color when there’s no grass, right? And so what we did is we took those images and we put them into ArcGIS, and then we started kind of messing around with, can AI identify what a divot looks like, and then, if it can identify what a divot looks like, and then identify all of the divots on the field, can it give a basic estimate of the surface area damage, and so moving forward, and this is something I hope they continue in the future, is, can they do that to kind of give sports field managers a better understanding of maybe how the surface played on any given game? Because these divots are pretty small, you know, especially when the field is new and doing well, sometimes they’re only maybe the size of a quarter, and so it’s not worth going out and flagging them all. We flagged some of the bigger ones, and we didn’t even have a ton of those. But in terms of the little ones, especially when you’re flying at a 40 feet elevation, which is what we were, you can pick up a lot of just the little wear and tear, even the stuff that they don’t spot field because it’s so small, but it’s definitely a cool project. I know that the drone industry is definitely moving forward quite rapidly, and so I hope that drones become part of this management practice for field managers, for a lot of different reasons. You know, you can use drones to, of course, do the research that we’re doing, check paint, or even a lot of the times, what I use for work is we use drones to make recordings over time. How does the field look over time? Maybe even if you have a really big event like a concert, you can take pictures of what it looks like before or after a game. You can manage how different big pieces of equipment are moved and placed on the field, drones are just a really cool tool.

BRAD NEWBOLD 28:22
You’re working as a drone specialist now, was that your first foray into working with drones?

KATIE ANSELMI 28:27
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I took a class at BYU drones. I was also doing the research on the field at the time, and I actually just needed some drone flights in order to pass the class. And so I was like, oh, can I go fly on the stadium, like, would that be okay? Risk management nightmare. But once we were able to get approval to do that, is really cool. And, yeah, that’s kind of what started this whole idea of flying drones on the field.

BRAD NEWBOLD 28:53
That’s cool. And I would assume this is a kind of an interdisciplinary group, unless you’re the one also learning, the machine learning and the AI, I would assume there’s other departments that you’re working with, other researchers as well?

KATIE ANSELMI 29:03
Yeah, that’s the idea moving forward. I think for me, I was trying to do all the AI stuff by myself, and it wasn’t going as well as I thought it would. I think it’d be really cool if BYU could rope another agency in there, or another department. We did have the geospatial department at BYU, so they were the ones that, well, first took the drone class with them and then learned how to do the image processing with them. Flew some of the drones with them. Dr Steve Schill does incredible drone work. All of the geospatial stuff was more in that department than it was with the Environmental Science Department.

BRAD NEWBOLD 29:37
Cool, a lot of emerging technologies or technologies that are out there that just haven’t really been adopted for particular applications and use cases and stuff. So looking ahead for this, you’re kind of wrapping this up. You said you’re working on, potentially publishing on on the drone and AI project there, but what have you learned within your research that you hope then gets passed on to other turf researchers or turf managers?

KATIE ANSELMI 30:01
I’ve developed a much greater appreciation for what field managers do. And my advisor, Dr Hansen, his idea of how he runs his research in his lab is he never wants to tell these people how to do their job right, because they’re the experts. What our job is as researchers is to just give them more tools to make their job easier. And so even when I was at BYU and moving forward, that’s what I hope to pass on, is that these are tools that we want professionals to use to make their jobs easier, to make things more manageable. In terms of resources, resource management is huge, especially in the sports field management industry, not only is it water and fertilizer, it’s time, it’s the number of hands you have of working on a field. All of that comes into play with your budgeting. And so for us to be able to say, here’s a tool we want to make it relatively easy to use, make the data relatively easy to process, so that you can kind of get a better understanding of how your field is playing, and that, in turn, just helps the athletes play play a better game.

BRAD NEWBOLD 31:06
I don’t know if there’s like a backlash against artificial turf that now people kind of veering back towards constructed fields.

KATIE ANSELMI 31:15
There definitely is. I’m glad this came up, because it’s worth noting, because that’s part of what makes this research so important is because there is kind of this push, and it’s actually coming from the athletes to go back to natural turf. There’s a couple key differences that make natural turf just better to play on overall. One of them is being just the way of turf construction. So when an athlete’s feet goes into the ground and it turns that soil is actually going to give a little bit, and that helps the the athletes joints from not tearing or for them being a lot of pressure that’s put on the athlete’s body, and artificial turf does not give in the same way you have a little beads and and so there actually have been a lot of studies that show that there are higher instances of non contact injury on artificial turf. It’s something that’s pretty, pretty well studied. And then another thing is temperature. There’s a lot of other environmental impacts that come with taking away that natural grass, which is a lot cooler, especially in the summer, artificial fields get really hot. Artificial fields overall are actually not as environmentally friendly as people say that they are, and they’re also not any easier to manage, because when you think about an artificial turf field, you have to wash it right so it doesn’t get dirty and have all those bacteria in there. You still have to make sure that the infill is set right, and sometimes you still have to paint it, depending on what it is. A lot of these key elements that, at the time they thought, oh, this would help the sports field management industry have ended up just kind of not being interesting.

BRAD NEWBOLD 32:51
So, yeah, I’ve kind of seen that firsthand. Baseball is my sport, especially here in the Pacific Northwest, we’ve got a lot of turf fields just for water management, not having flooded fields, and so having playable fields. But, yeah, there’s, there’s difficulty, because you’ll have a lot of those fields where you will have, like a turf infield, but then a grass outfield, talking earlier about, you know, footwear and those kinds of things. And so you have these kids who are especially those there in the outfield that need their spikes to be running in the outfield, in the grass to get good traction. But then what do they do when they’re trying to play on the turf? You know, they’re they’re up to bat, or they get switched the infield, and so you’ll have, like, yeah, kids catching their cleats, you know, spraining ankles, all that fun stuff. So, yeah, it’s an interesting conversation. We’ll see where it goes.

KATIE ANSELMI 33:33
Yeah, definitely. And, I mean, the NFL is kind of one of the leaders in this conversation, right? They have athletes who would much rather prefer to play on natural turf. Even a lot of the really high level injuries that you see in the NFL that people talk about, like Aaron Rodgers artificial turf injury.

BRAD NEWBOLD 33:49
What advice would you give to grad students or to early career researchers when it comes to incorporating environmental measuring and sensing with sports turf research and management.

KATIE ANSELMI 34:01
First thing is, if it doesn’t work out the first time, it’s okay. And that’s something that I think a lot of grad students learn, is that sometimes you have an idea and you think it’s going to work out a certain way, and then it doesn’t the ability to be able to shift your perspective and to take in the new data that you’re learning, even if it’s not what you want to see happen with your project. I kind of spun my wheels for the first year of my master’s thesis, and then ended up doing the entire thing in a year. Not ideal, but I learned a lot. And so I think that’s something that if you are doing research, you should almost kind of expect you know that it’s not going to go perfectly as planned, especially when you’re doing the cutting edge stuff trying to make most impact rely on your team. Is a lot of the ideas that we had were just from talking to other people, especially field managers, kind of seeing what do you need on a daily basis and incorporating them as part of your team. Right? We saw the managers at BYU as part of the team, right? They weren’t just people that we were feeding information to or coming in saying, oh, we’re the scientists we’re going to tell you how to do your job. Absolutely not they were part of the team. And I guess the last thing, at least for me, is do research that you think really matters, do things that people are going to want to read. That’s a huge thing for me, is I want to publish places where people are going to read this, even if maybe it’s not the most highly acclimated journal, and maybe that makes me not the best research for saying that, but I’d much rather publish somewhere that’s less prestigious, but sports field managers are going to pick up it up and read it and say, oh, this is really cool I might want to try this.

BRAD NEWBOLD 35:39
Totally Any final thoughts for our audience?

KATIE ANSELMI 35:42
You know, go Cougs. Yeah so that should be pretty obvious after this. Yeah, it was really great to be here.

BRAD NEWBOLD 35:48
Good. We can say Go Cougs up here too. See, oh yeah, because, we got crimson Cougs up here.

KATIE ANSELMI 35:53
We can say Go Cougs already.

BRAD NEWBOLD 35:55
All right, that’s gonna wrap it up for us. Thanks again. Katie, it was good to see you again. It’s kind of fun. We haven’t done this very often where we’ve had a a follow up interview with with our previous guests.

KATIE ANSELMI 36:06
I love to talk about sports so.

BRAD NEWBOLD 36:09
Yeah, we’ll have you again to talk about your future endeavors, cool. And if you in the audience have any questions about this topic or want to hear more, feel free to contact us at metergroup.com or reach out to us on X @meter_env and you can also view the full transcript from today in the podcast description. That’s all for now, stay safe and we’ll catch you next time on We Measure The World.