In response to beach & dune erosion, many coastal communities elect to “nourish” their beaches with sand from offshore reservoirs for added protection. We leveraged relationships with our management partners to study the effect of beach nourishment on dune dynamics during a joint (i.e., multi-town) beach nourishment in 2023. Specifically, we aim to 1) quantify spatial and temporal changes to the beach and dune profile following beach nourishment at three sites; and 2) link these changes to vegetation-sediment feedbacks associated with local plant communities. The resulting data both improve our understanding of time-dependent dune dynamics and help determine the ability of ecogeomorphic interactions to enhance dune
growth following beach nourishment.

The results of this work will be presented at Coastal Dynamics 2025 in Aviero, Portugal and published in the conference proceedings. Importantly, our results underscore the role of vegetation feedbacks following beach and dune nourishment, and suggest that strategic vegetation plantings can be leveraged to amplify the benefits of beach nourishment through effective trapping of wind-blown sediment, stimulating dune growth, and/or reversing dune volume losses. Stay tuned for more updates!