Farther east, the Beechwood Organization recently bought the 27-hole Mill Pond Golf Course in Medford and will break ground in the summer on a 280-unit development of attached homes and town houses called Country Pointe at Medford.
Snacking high on the aquatic food chain in tens of thousands of U.S. lakes, ponds, reservoirs, golf course water hazards, irrigation ditches and roadside borrow pits lurks Micropterus salmoides, the largemouth bass.
It has become more common in urban landscapes in Florida since the late 1990s, and is one of a number of wetland-dependent bird species which forages in man-made ponds on golf courses in the southwest of the state.
All except the last one tell of winter; a seagull flying in the distance; dogs who match the landscape; a frozen pond where a child will skate; a dog reflected in a pond; a golf course covered with snow where children pelt down the slope on sleds; the last scene is in May & tells of a father looking at the water in a salt marsh.
"It's very long and narrow, which affords good views of the Sound on one side and the pond and golf courses on the other," he said.
When the model examining the configuration of greenspaces was analyzed, estimated species richness was greater at golf ponds as compared to either rural or urban ponds, and richness increased with increasing connectivity of greenspaces.
Three Ponds features a golf course designed by Rees Jones, its own pro shop, 14 gardens and three ponds stocked with fish.
Maintenance crews still work daily on the property, cleaning the ponds, mowing the golf course, and weeding the gardens.
"Let's be serious, not everybody looks at a murky, slimy, alligator-infested pond filled with golf course pesticide and fertilizer runoff and sees a business opportunity," Siwek said.
We used a hierarchical Bayesian species-richness model to estimate species richness and species-specific occupancy responses to three pond types (rural, golf, or urban) and four landscape measurements of greenspace (i.e., Euclidean nearest neighbor, interspersion juxtaposition, percent of landscape, and connectance), generated in FRAGSTATS.
