Our partners at the University of Florida were quoted in a new article from The Washington Post titled “Dunes aren’t just big piles of sand. Here’s why Earth needs them.”
Dunes are sandy landforms that line shores, supporting vegetation and wildlife and providing protection from storm surge. They form when sand is windblown up a beach and trapped by plants, gradually accumulating into stable hills formed around a vegetative root system.
The article quoted Christine Angelini, director of UF’s Center for Coastal Solutions, on why conserving natural dunes is so crucial to coastal protection and restoration. Building and maintaining man-made dunes is possible, but it’s hard to recreate the root systems that make them so resilient.
“You’re basically short-circuiting those natural processes that normally form a robust dune that’s built to withstand the conditions on our coastline,” Angelini said. “We’re facing a really aggressive set of conditions that make it really difficult to essentially get these systems robustly established.”
One of the core missions of the Network for Engineering With Nature is the idea of Scaling Up: Mainstreaming natural infrastructure techniques (like dune restoration) for broad societal benefits– so seeing our partners’ research in major news sources is always exciting!
Read the full article by Allyson Chiu here.
Featured image by Mohan Nannapaneni via Pixels.com.
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