I was coming here to say that! It’s possibly apocryphal, but the way I heard it was that the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign did this when they did their main quad (I still remember them telling me this when I got a tour before applying there 30 years ago). And they didn’t just look for where the plants were dead, but they also looked for broadleaf weeds, which sustain trampling better than grasses (it’s a land grant university in the midwest. Of course there’s an agriculture angle).
I was coming here to say that! It’s possibly apocryphal, but the way I heard it was that the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign did this when they did their main quad (I still remember them telling me this when I got a tour before applying there 30 years ago). And they didn’t just look for where the plants were dead, but they also looked for broadleaf weeds, which sustain trampling better than grasses (it’s a land grant university in the midwest. Of course there’s an agriculture angle).