I thought I would start a thread putting all the definitions on one thread. This is to help educate us and club members that miss define typically Parkland courses for Woodlands. Feel free to post your opinions and we can amend the OP. Some of us agreed upon a ''Prairie'' a new category earlier this year. I used some posts and cited them from prior threads to compile these onto 1 thread.
Parklands- ''A Parkland normally has a very open aspect to it with GROUPS of trees integrated into the landscape. The idea was to allow the visitor specific views of the surrounding area. Many courses claiming to be parkland do not have the open vista aspect so central to parklands and are in reality tree-lined or woodland courses.’’- Jon Wigget
‘’I'll get into some of the details of it tomorrow but the term "Park" (parkland) in this particular context goes back to England in the 18th century particularly amongst some of those famous English landscape gardners or landscape architects like William Kent, Lancelot "Capability" Brown, Humphrey Repton who did some of those famous massive English estates on a grand scale of hundreds of acres. Blenheim is an example. Those estate lands were called "parks" and that's where the term parkland came from in the context that was applied to the style of golf course called "parkland". In some cases some of the late 19th century English golf courses were just done right into those preexisting "parks" or parkland estates.’’- Tom Paul
"Open land consisting of fields and scattered groups of trees."- Oxford Dictionaries
Woodlands- A course that is carved out of a forest. The course could have been Parklands at one time and due to excessive over-planting it has become tree lined without being in small clusters. These course block vistas of numerous neighboring holes and land features along with the scale of the land as well. – Ben Cowan
Heathlands- ''Heathland is a lowland habitat, and is favoured where climatic conditions are typically warm and dry, particularly in summer, and soils acidic, of low fertility, and often sandy and very free-draining; bogs do occur where drainage is poor, but are usually only small in extent. It is dominated by low shrubs, 0.2-2 m tall, particularly heather (Calluna vulgaris), heath (Erica species) and gorse (Ulex species). It is noted for the brilliant colours when these species flower in late summer (see photo, left). The habitat is maintained artificially by a combination of grazing and periodic burning, or (rarely) mowing; if not so maintained, it is rapidly re-colonised by forest, mainly of pine (Pinus species) and Silver birch (Betula pendula).
Heathlands have a very typical associated bird fauna, notably Montagu's Harrier, Eurasian Hobby, European Nightjar, Wood Lark, Tree Pipit, European Stonechat and Dartford Warbler; where there are scattered trees, Green Woodpecker is also characteristic. Some reptiles are also largely confined to healthland, notably the Sand Lizard and the Smooth Snake, and one amphibian, the Natterjack Toad. It is also an excellent habitat for ants with many species being restricted entirely to it.
One of the biggest heathlands is the L?ger Heide in northern Germany. Other notable heaths include large parts of the New Forest and the Breckland in southern and eastern England respectively, and the Veluwe in the Netherlands, and smaller areas in Dorset, Devon and Surrey in southern England. Heathland habitats are also found in parts of Denmark, France and Spain.’’- Tony Muldoon via Google
Prairie/Dunesland- A new category that pertains mostly to sandy soil courses that have similar traits to a Heathland and Links. There are very few or next to no trees on the interior corridors of the course. Fine fescues are used for rough and these courses are typically one cut. -Ben Cowan
Links- ‘’ The word links comes from the Old English hlincas, meaning “ridges.” The Scottish term links came to mean the undulating sandy ground near a shore, which was full of ridges of windswept and hills formed by the forces of the weather and sea.’’ -from Routing the Golf Course via Forrest Richardson
‘’Linksland is land located proximal to an open sea, or bay which is connected directly to an open sea, and which possesses the characteristics of naturally rolling sand dunes or land features formed by the wind, the ocean and the receding tides; whether the land is traversed by a river or estuary associated with the land is superfluous and it may be noted that the presence of a river or other tributary or body of water differing from an ocean or sea is in and of itself not justification for land to be called bona fide linksland; land approximating linksland in this event is, in slang, "linksish" in nature, but clearly not true linksland’’- Forrest Richardson via "On Course – A Dictionary of Golf Course terms"