This week is National Groundwater Awareness Week. Throughout the week, The Groundwater Foundation works to educate and promote the preservation and protection of our groundwater.

The foundation’s main goal is to conserve groundwater for future generations. Educational programs and projects can be found on their website, groundwater.org, that both encourage communities to protect their groundwater supply, but also recognize green spaces that currently maintain good practices.

The Groundwater Guardian Green Site program is one program through the foundation that helps recognize “groundwater stewardship” of green spaces like golf courses, according to the foundation’s website.

Cindy Kreifels, the executive vice president of The Groundwater Foundation encourages superintendents to get involved with their programs. “Superintendents go through our application process and let us know what they’re doing that are groundwater friendly practices around several questions that we put forth. So it’s everything from saving water to reducing fertilizer and pesticide use or taking other toxins out of the environment on their site, in the appropriate manner,” says Kreifels.

After getting involved, superintendents can utilize the foundation’s resources as a way to further educate their golfers about how and why they are maintaining the course the way they are. “It’s a really nice PR tool for golf courses. Sometimes people like to point fingers and not always appropriately so. They look at golf courses as the ones that are using a lot of fertilizers and pesticides or using a lot of water because they have that nice green grass. If the sites are managing the area in a responsible manner, it’s worthy of being noticed,” says Kreifels.

Having the right practices at courses is important because groundwater is an important part of our environment. Mark Johnson, GCSAA senior manager of environmental programs, shares Kreifels’ sentinments about groundwater’s importance. “It’s an important issue, the problem is ground water is out of sight, out of mind for most Americans. So when groundwater week pops up, we’ve been promoting it as much as possible,” says Johnson. He continued to ask anyone who can get involved in the golf industry, to do so.

“Groundwater is one of the most valuable resources that we have and over 50 percent of Americans drink ground water,” says Kreifels. “Groundwater is connected to all other natural resources and to a lot of the things we like to do in our lives.”

During this week, and every week, both golf courses and communities around the country can learn more about how to conserve groundwater by visiting The Groundwater Foundation’s website (http://www.groundwater.org/).