Sea turtle nesting presents a potential pathway to subsidize nutrient-poor dune ecosystems, which provide the nesting habitat for sea turtles. To assess whether this positive feedback between dune plants and turtle nests exists, we measured N concentration and delta15N values in dune soils, leaves from a common dune plant (sea oats [Uniola paniculata]), and addled eggs of loggerhead (Caretta ca...

In the present work, we use dune modeling in order to investigate the evolution of transverse dunes in the presence of vegetation. The vegetation is allowed to grow up to a maximum height Hmax with a growth rate R that oscillates in time. We find that the presence of the vegetation establishes a maximum height for the transverse dunes. If the transverse dune is larger than this maximum size, th...

Aeolian transport in coastal areas can be significantly affected by the presence of an exposed water table. In some dune fields, such as in Lençóis Maranhenses, northeastern Brazil, the water table oscillates in response to seasonal changes of rainfall and rates of evapotranspiration, rising above the ground during the wet season and sinking below in the dry period. Understanding dune mobility ...

Vegetated dunes are recognized as important natural barriers that shelter inland ecosystems and coastlines suffering daily erosive impacts of the sea and extreme events, such as tsunamis. However, societal responses to erosion and shoreline retreat often result in man-made coastal defence structures that cover part of the intertidal and upper shore zones causing coastal squeeze and habitat loss...

DUNE-FEM is a free discretization toolbox for parallel and adaptive scientific computing based on DUNE. The implementation of discretization schemes such as finite elements, finite volumes or discontinuous Galerkin schemes is based on abstractions that are very close to the mathematical description of the underlying methods. In this contribution we will give a compact overview on the design and...

Dune systems along the southeastern shores of Lake Huron have become severely impacted as the result of increases in recreational activities and shoreline development. Dune conservation activities at Lake Huron’s provincial parks have occurred only within the past 20 to 25 years. Activities on dunes outside of the parks, including municipal and private lands, have only occurred within the last ...

Fairy Circles (FCs) are barren circular patches of soil surrounded by grass species, the origin of which is poorly understood. FCs feature in both the gravel plains and dune fields of the Namib Desert. While a substantial number of hypotheses to explain the origin and/or sustainability of fairy circles have been presented, none are completely consistent with either their properties or distribut...

The dune-functions Dune module introduces a new programmer interface for discrete and non-discrete functions. Unlike the previous interfaces considered in the existing Dune modules, it is based on overloading operator(), and returning values by-value. This makes user code much more readable, and allows the incorporation of newer C++ features such as lambda expressions. Run-time polymorphism is ...