This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Building with nature is an important concept in our coastal defense. After all, by harnessing natural processes, we are more resilient to sea level rise.
A good understanding of these processes is therefore indispensable. Ecologist Paul Berghuis, affiliated with Utrecht University and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), delved into the world of dune formation and discovered that within young dune landscapes, dunes and grasses do not arrange themselves randomly but follow a fixed pattern. Berghuis' specialty is spatial ecology: He is particularly interested in spatial patterns in the interaction between organisms and their environment.
For his research into dune formation, he studied the relationship between marram grass and sand. It has been known for years that marram grass plays an important role in dune formation, but Berghuis examined this phenomenon on a larger scale: By studying aerial photographs taken over time, he looked for fixed patterns in the landscape. The work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That may sound a bit abstract, but as Berghuis notes: "Quite a lot is already known about individual plants and processes, but how does such a complex system of sand and vegetation fit together as a whole? That question influenced the scale on which we researched the dunes and what we learned." Berghuis therefore did not study the dune landscape as a collection of individually operating dune grasses, but as a landscape that organizes itself at the system level. "Then you suddenly see characteristics of growth and resilience that are different from what we might expect for individual dunes and dune grasses." In previously studied ecosystems, such as mussel beds or vegetation in savannas, a regular pattern emerges, with patches of approximately the same size and similar distances between them.
But something strange is going on with dune formation, Berghuis discovered. Sand is moved by the wind again and again before it settles somewhere, and where marram grass plants are growing closely together, the sand is best retained. At these high densities of marram grass, the dune continues to grow, often at the expense of its neighboring dunes.
Small dunes are left behind or even disappear, and the larger dunes merge." This pattern is no fluke. Co-author Koen Siteur and other colleagues have previously argued that the spatial organization of some ecosystems resembles the physics of phase separation. This is the process we see, for example, when we make salad dressing, where oil floats on vinegar: After shaking, the oil droplets form larger and larger droplets, with the large ones growing at the expense of the small ones.
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