Sand dune ecology

Sand dune systems are excellent places for biodiversity, partly because they are not very productive for agriculture, and partly because disturbed, stressful, and stable habitats are present in proximity to each other. Many of them are protected as nature reserves, and some are parts of larger conservation areas, incorporating other coastal habitats like salt marshes, mud flats, grasslands, scrub, and woodland.

Plant habitat

Sand dunes provide a range of habitats for a range of unusual, interesting and characteristic plants that can cope with disturbed habitats. In the UK these may include restharrow Ononis repens, sand spurge Euphorbia arenaria and ragwort Senecio vulgaris - such plants are termed ruderals.

Other very specialised plants are adapted to the accretion of sand, surviving the continual burial of their shoots by sending up very rapid vertical growth. Marram grass, Ammophila arenaria specialises in this, and is largely responsible for the formation and stabilisation of many dunes by binding sand grains together. The sand couch-grass Elytrigia juncea also performs this function on the seaward edge of the dunes, and is responsible, with some other pioneers like the sea rocket Cakile maritima, for initiating the process of dune building by trapping wind blown sand.

In accreting situations small mounds of vegetation or tide-washed debris form and tend to enlarge as the wind-speed drops in the lee of the mound, allowing blowing sand (picked up from the off-shore banks) to fall out of the air stream. The pioneering plants are physiologically adapted to withstand the problems of high salt contents in the air and soil, and are good examples of stress tolerators, as well as having some ruderal characteristics.