Vegetation at the aquatic-terrestrial interface can alter landscape features through its growth and interactions with sediment and fluids. Even similar species may impart different effects due to variation in their interactions and feedbacks with the environment. Consequently, replacement of one engineering species by another can cause significant change in the physical environment. Here we inv...

The mycorrhizal status of dune plants from the island of Hawaii was investigated. All plants, including Batis maritima, Cocos nucifer, Ipomoea brasiliensis, Pennisetum setaceum , Prosopis pallida, Scaevola taccada, and Sporobolus sp., had vesicular urbuscular mycorrhizae (VAM) . Levels of colonization by VAM fungi ranged from less than 10% to 100% of the root length and were highest in Ipomoea ...

The structure of the barchan field located between Tarfaya and Laayoune (Atlantic Sahara, Morroco) is quantitatively investigated and compared to that in La Pampa de la Joya (Arequipa, Peru). On the basis of field measurements, we show how the volume, the velocity and the output sand flux of a dune can be computed from the value of its body and horn widths. The dune size distribution is obtaine...

Studies of sand saltation are currently concentrating on wind tunnel experiments, theoretical analyses and numerical simulations under ideal as well as controllable conditions. These theoretical analyses and numerical simulations cannot accurately predict sand movements in field environments. In this paper, we simulate wind field patterns for two different surfaces of complex microtopography us...

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...

Barchan dunes — crescent-shaped dunes that form in areas of unidirectional winds and low sand availability — commonly display an asymmetric shape, with one limb extended downwind. Several factors have been identified as potential causes for barchan dune asymmetry on Earth and Mars: asymmetric bimodal wind regime, topography, influx asymmetry and dune collision. However, the dynamics and potenti...

Wind on Mars is a significant agent of contemporary surface change, yet the absence of in situ meteorological data hampers the understanding of surface-atmospheric interactions. Airflow models at length scales relevant to landform size now enable examination of conditions that might activate even small-scale bedforms (ripples) under certain contemporary wind regimes. Ripples have the potential ...

Avalanche (grainflow) processes are fundamental drivers of dune morphodynamics and are typically initiated by grainfall accumulations. In sedimentary systems, however, the dynamism between grainfall and grainflow remains unspecified because simple measurements are hampered by the inherent instability of lee slopes. Here, for the first time, terrestrial laser scanning is used to quantify key asp...

microbial calcium carbonate, by bridging sand particles, can play an important role in sand dune stability. a study was carried out on the cementation of sand grains and infilling of pore spaces by caco3. two bacterial species (sporosarcina pasteurii and sporosarcina ureae), three reactant concentrations (0.5, 1 and 1.5m), and six reaction times (12, 24, 48, 96, 192 and 288 hours) were tested i...

Barchan dunes — crescent-shaped dunes that form in areas of unidirectional winds and low sand availability — commonly display an asymmetric shape, with one limb extended downwind. Several factors have been identified as potential causes for barchan dune asymmetry on Earth and Mars: asymmetric bimodal wind regime, topography, influx asymmetry and dune collision. However, the dynamics and potenti...