Volunteers visited the Manila Dunes in Arcata Feb. 15 to tug invasive grasses from the sands in a monthly gathering facilitated by Friends of the Dunes. The volunteers of all ages from youthful college students to gray-haired, retired locals removed beach grass to allow native plants to repopulate the dunes.
Sandra Jerabek helps manage Tolowa Coastal Dunes near Crescent City, Calif. Jerabek calls herself a “generalist naturalist” with 20 years of environmental work and says the discovery of Del Norte County was ideal.
“This was my perfect place, to be grounded, to really dig my roots into this place and learn all about it,” Jerabek said.
Jerabek and volunteers of the Tolowa Dunes Stewards help maintain the park. Jerabek founded the Tolowa Dunes Stewards and helps to manage the community member volunteers that work to restore the land.
Jerabek took a group from Friends of the Dunes on a walk through the Tolowa Coastal Dunes forest and lagoon on Feb. 5.
Cities cause humans to forget how remote areas next door can be. It is abrupt to arrive at Tolowa Dunes visitor center at 2591 Old Mill Road after a few turns from the city.
The first view is of open grassland towards the ocean, still some distance away. To the east is pine forest with sandy debris ground and low plant cover.
Tolowa Dunes State Park is only a short distance away by car, about an hour and a half drive north of Eureka. This 11,000 acre is the center where Tolowa Dee-ni’ people lived.
The once beautiful, free land and ancestral home to the Tolowa Dee-ni’ native people was transformed into ranch land as settlers chose harm and death. The Tolowa Dunes State Park is now free and open to all.
Friends of the Dunes sponsors dune walks at Tolowa Dunes near Crescent City. With over 60 miles of shore, water is always close at hand while walking through the forest.
The body of water to the east is called Lake Earl and the Pacific Ocean is further to the west.
Lake Earl Wildlife Area at Tolowa Dunes is a natural lagoon habitat filled by rain and runoff, a brackish marsh and an ocean mix when the sandbar washes out in winter.
With otters, hawks, porcupine and over 320 species of birds, this is just the place for binoculars. The area also holds 500 plant species and over 400 fungi, woodland and waterways.
Bicycling on the designated trail, horseback riding, hiking, canoeing, birding and simply enjoying nature are all wonderful things to do at Tolowa Dunes.
In only the second half of the second year of the Dunes Climate Ready Study, the project is already providing researchers with interesting data. This projected five-year study is expected to provide a better understanding of sediment movement along the Eureka littoral cell, a 32-mile stretch of coastline from Little River north of McKinleyville, down to Centerville beach.
Friends of the Dunes’ director Kim McFarland provided insight into how the project originated and what stage the study is at currently.
McFarland explained how collecting topographical data in specific locations along the transect will allow researchers to map sand movement through the dunes under different vegetative conditions, and eventually determine how this affects dune structure.
“They are able to put all of this [data] into a computer and see the actual contour of the dune and how it changes over time,” McFarland said.
Andrea Pickart, a coastal ecologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Ian Walker, a geomorphologist teaching at Arizona State University, are leading the Dunes Climate Ready Study.
They wanted to do “a bigger picture study on dune restoration and the implications of that for climate change, climate variability impacts and resilience of the dune system to ongoing erosion and future sea level rise,” Walker said.
Pickart and Walker started out by doing a few basic experiments on air flow and sand transport and how those maintain the dune systems. From there, they worked to get funding to expand their studies on dune restoration applying to multiple institutions in the hopes of starting a new in depth study.
In 2015, the California State Coastal Conservancy awarded Friends of the Dunes a $249,000 grant to fund the first two years of the Dunes Climate Ready Study.
“The objective was to better understand the effects of climate change and sea level rise on coastal dunes…to assess vulnerabilities arising from the impacts of sea level rise and assist the community in preparing for those impacts,” Pickart said.
Originally, the main focus was to establish a monitoring system for the regional beach-dune environment. The first step was to determine the placement and setup close to 60 transects along the 32-mile stretch of coast.
“We are taking these profiles of dunes all along that 32-mile stretch of dunes… we are taking topographic vegetation profiles,” Walker said. “It’s a way of looking at the beach and the foredune…just behind the foredune, the real land-ocean interface and seeing what kind of sand movements or sand exchange happens between the beach and the fordune.”
At the end of the five-year study the data will be used as a model response to sea level rise under different circumstances.
The first survey began on Jan. 4, 2016, and will continue for the duration of the study. Measuring the wind flow and sediment transport is one of the main focuses of the study, but examining how the native versus non-native plants interact with the dunes is also extremely important in order to understand the relationship between these two variables in the dunes environment.
“There’s different components to this research, and one component of it is how native plants versus non-native plants affect the movement of sand from the beach into the foredune and then the backdune,” Pickart said.
Invasive plants play an interesting role in altering the physical processes of wind flow and sediment transport. Foredunes produced from invasive vegetation are different than foredunes with native vegetation.
“The primary non-native species we have here is a non-native beachgrass, which grows much more densely than our [California] native dune grass,” Pickart said. “But they are both grasses that trap sand and allow dunes to build.”
Data from this study is still being collected and will be a part of the research over the next couple of years.
“What we’ve seen to date is that after removing the over-stabilizing European beach grass, we have, in fact, observed that the sand budget has been reconnected between the beach and the backdune,” Pickart said.
“In other words, we’re seeing movement of sand all along the beach and into the back dunes, and that was part of our hypothesis, that native plants would allow for more free movement of sand over the top of the foredune and into the backdune.”
European beachgrass is the main inhibitor of sand movement. For this reason, Friends of the Dunes works to have volunteers remove the invasive species, allowing sand to move more freely between the beach and the foredune.
The sands freedom will allow the translation of the foredune: “which is the movement of the foredune inland and up in elevation as sea level rises,” Walker said.
“Basically, we know that the European beachgrass traps more sand. The experiment is whether having the native plants allow more sand to bypass is going to facilitate this inland translation of the foredune,” Pickart said.
European beach grass, also known as Ammophila, is a main inhibitor of sand movement. Because of this, Friends of the Dunes works to have volunteers come and remove the invasive species allowing sand to move more freely between the beach and the foredune.
Another branch of the study has been the creation and monitoring of two different adaptation sites. These sites are meant to help determine the desirable planting composition that allows for sand transport.
“The experiment is whether having the native plants allow more sand to bypass is going to facilitate this inland translation of the foredune,” Pickart said.
The sites are often used as to house smaller pilot studies to provide answers to some of the more specific detailed questions, for example, how grain size affects sand movement, the impacts of the upward migration of a foredune, how herbivory affects sand transport and multiple other experiments.
There are many different collaborators such as the Wildlands Conservancy, students from the University of Victoria and HSU students and staff. The adaptation sites will continue to provide a wealth of information throughout the study, helping to answer specific questions on dune structure and sand movement.
With the study still less than halfway into their five-year projection, there is still a lot of research to be done. But from the data seen so far, the Dunes Climate Ready Study has the potential to alter how researchers view dune restoration and the impacts of climate change.
To learn more about the Dunes Climate Ready Study, you can visit the page dedicated to the study on the Friends of the Dunes site HERE! The page contains an archive of quarterly updates on the study if you are interested in learning more about it, or if you simply want to stay updated on the most recent research.
If you would like to be apart of the dune restoration projects to combat native species and climate change visit the Friends of the Dunes volunteer page, HERE!
This story was updated on Feb. 1, 2018 from its original publication on Jan. 15, 2018 per request by the author.
Going out to the Humboldt Dunes for Halloween is an exciting and educational adventure for many families. Friends of the Dunes have hosted Spooky Dunes for over five years. Upon arriving, the kids are shown to the crafts tables where they wait until their Spooky Dune Tour begins.
On the Spooky Dune Tour, the kids are led on a short hike around the dunes where they meet some spooky characters that teach them about the dunes. Each of the children are given a “passport” to be stamped at each station on the tour. Once the card is full at the end of the tour, they get to choose a prize upon returning to the Nature Center. The passport also has Creepy Dune Bingo on the back for the kids to fill out along the tour.
Ashley Hansen, the outreach coordinator for Friends of the Dunes, enjoys Spooky Dunes because it “helps spread the word about the dunes.” Hansen also said, “It’s a fun way to get kids outdoors learning about the dunes.”
With five stops on the tour, the kids and their parents were first lead to the Beach Pine Palace where they were met by Franny Fox and Misty the Moss Queen. Franny and Misty taught the kids about different moss, fungi and lichens that live in the dunes environment.
At the second stop, they met Dante the Wind Wizard and Ginger the Grey Fox. They gave the kids animal track booklets and were shown how to identify a few different kinds of tracks.
At the third station, they were introduced to Captain Howard, a pirate looking for his treasure. At this stop, the kids were able to use a telescope to look out over the dunes.
For the fourth spot on the tour, the kids were able to help Flora the fairy remember some of the flowers that live on the dunes. Flora and her friend Daisy the flower handed out flower identification books so that the kids could find and learn what kinds of flowers were in the area.
After leaving Daisy and Flora, we ran into the Beachgrass Monster. At the final station, the Humboldt Wallflower asked the kids to help him fight the Beachgrass Monster by pulling out beachgrass. They learned that beachgrass was an invasive plant that has to be removed from the dunes.
One of the the tour guides let the kids know that because they had helped in the effort to remove beachgrass from the dunes that they were now members of the Dune Hero’s crew.
After helping fight the Beachgrass dune monster the kids returned were led back to the nature center to collect prizes. Some walked away talking about their prize bug box or their beautiful new shell, but many were talking about something else.
“I liked the Dune Monster,” said Shannon Smith, a witch who had gone on the tour for the first time.
Shannon’s mom Jessica Smith was glad they had come, she thought that the tour was both fun and educational.
In agreement with Jessica, April Moreland was happy she brought her three children to Spooky Dunes.
“I thought it was really great, it was super educational,” said April Mooreland.