Early ecological descriptions of barrier island dune landscapes recognized the importance of biogeomorphic feedbacks and thresholds. However, these dynamics have not been formally linked to complexity theory. In this article, I develop models of dune landscape phase states, or stability domains, based on a synthesis of these prior studies and statistical analyses. Data for these analyses were o...

Coastal dune plants are subjected to natural multiple stresses and vulnerable to global change. Some changes associated with global change could interact in their effects on vegetation. As vegetation plays a fundamental role in building and stabilizing dune systems, effective coastal habitat management requires a better understanding of the combined effects of such changes on plant populations....

DUNE, the “Distributed and Unified Numerics Environment” [5, 2, 1, 3] is a modular software toolbox for solving partial differential equations. When initiating DUNE the rule in scientific software development was that PhD students were given a legacy software and further extended it during their PhD until it did fit their needs. The purpose of this custom software was to produce publishable sci...

Studies of dune vegetation patterns have emphasized two structuring agents: local environmental gradients that shape the prominent zonation of coastal plant species, and disturbance patches initiated by overwash during coastal storms. For dune systems of two barrier islands in the Georgia Bight, we investigate how the interplay of these two conceptual frames generate patterns in (1) longitudina...

Clonal plants, which reproduce by means of stolons and rhizomes, are common in frequently flooded habitats. Resilience to disturbance is an important trait enabling plants to survive in such highly disturbed habitats. Resource storage is thought to enable clonal plants to resume growth after clonal fragmentation caused by disturbance. Here we investigated if submergence prior to disturbance red...

A linear stability analysis of sediment transport by wind or water over an erodible bed shows that perturbations in a narrow range of wavenumbers are ampli ed, leading to the formation of ripples with a wavelength dependent on the roughness length of the bed. The roughness length is proportional to the grain size of the sand and the square of the excess shear velocity at the bed. We propose tha...

Barrier islands are exposed to the wind and wave action from storms, which often disturbs both the geomorphology and vegetation. Conservation and restoration efforts for these important habitats could be improved with knowledge of how native plants respond to storms. We analyzed 10 years of annual data of vegetation of St. George Island, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico, to quantify how the plant...

Saline playas in north-western Nevada, U.S.A., remnants of pluvial periods of the Pleistocene, represent a tremendous source of unconsolidated sediments available for aeolian transport. This study investigated the transport of aqueous-soluble solutes in dust from July 1994 through June 1996 along a transect from a barren salt-encrusted playa surface (elevation"1224 m), to a former pluvial lake ...

The dune system of Lake Michigan at Sturgeon Bay leads back thousands of years into the surrounding forest and intermittently form small pools in the swales of the dunes. Maintained by rainwater and including a unique composition of species and chemistry, the pools of the dunes and the surrounding terrestrial life show a pattern of diversity unique to dune swales. Percent cover of species at fo...

Sand dunes are found in a wide variety of shapes in deserts and coasts, and also on the planet Mars. The basic mechanisms of dune formation could be incorporated into a continuum saltation model, which successfully reproduced the shape of the barchan dunes and has been also applied to calculate interaction of barchans in a field. We have recently extended our dune model to investigate other dun...