Smyth, Thomas A.G. and Rooney, Paul and Yates, Katherine L. (2023) Dune slope, not wind speed, best predicts bare sand in vegetated coastal dunes. Journal of Coastal Conservation, 27. ISSN 1400-0350
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Abstract
Globally vegetation cover on coastal sand dunes has increased since at least the 1950s. With the aim of restoring or increasing biodiversity, land managers in several countries have removed vegetation and/or reprofiled dune slopes to reinvigorate geomorphic activity. However, the longevity of these interventions can be relatively short (on the order of 5 to 10 years), and further active management is required. Hypotheses for controls on geomorphic activity on dunes have frequently suggested that wind speedis the most important controlling factor. Here we show dune slope to be the best predictor of bare sand at four predominantly vegetated coastal sand dunes in England and Wales. We suggest that bare sand on steep dune slopes is maintained by three important factors: (1) Wind erosion, due to topographic acceleration (2) Granular avalanches of unconsolidated sediment and (3) Rotational slumping of unstable slopes. Our results indicate that where land managers wish to ‘rejuvenate’ areas of bare sand, efforts should focus on steep windward dune slopes and reprofiling of the dune slope should mimic the concave profiles of active slope faces on active parabolic dunes with an
overall slope angle of between 18° and 23° from the dune toe to the crest.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information and Comments: | © The Author(s) 2023. his article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Computer Science and the Environment |
| Depositing User: | Matthew Adams |
| Date Deposited: | 19 Jul 2023 08:56 |
| Last Modified: | 14 Jan 2025 10:18 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3993 |
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