[Posted by Chuck Almdale, submitted by Larry Loeher]

Opinion: Here’s one way to protect California’s beaches from rising seas: Stop messing with them

Los Angeles Times | Karina Johnson | 20 Oct 2023
Karina Johnston is a doctoral student at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and the Marine Science Institute.

From the article:

Protecting our coasts from sea level rise is increasingly urgent, especially for densely populated coastal communities such as Southern California’s. Coastal flooding and beach erosion from rising seas and storms are far more than a threat; they’re already happening in many places in California and beyond. But new research suggests one relatively simple means of shoring up our beaches: leaving them alone.

The native coastal foredune plant species we seeded the site with, such as red sand verbena (Abronia maritima) and beach bur (Ambrosia chamissonis), are specialists at trapping and holding sand in place. As these plants grow, they act as living ecosystem engineers that trap small mounds of sand, grow on top of them, trap more sand and so forth. Over time, with sufficient sand and beach width, they promote the formation of dunes.

By the sixth year of the study, the new dunes had risen to a height of more than 3 feet in many places. Overall, the site had accumulated more than 2,200 cubic yards of sand — enough to fill more than 200 large dump trucks. The dunes grew at more than 10 times the rate of sea level rise during the years of our study.