Dear Ecofriends, Here are the answers I got about measuring sand erosion/deposition in coastal dunes.
In summary I believe a combination of two approaches will suffice: 1 - Weighting sand deposition in plastic pots buried to sand surface 2 - Measuring the height of sand deposition against flat and graded surfaces like wood or aluminum rectangles. I will probably place one pot and one rectangle in each permanent plot and then model the resulting sand deposition surface in both grams and cm. Thank you for the quick response. All the best, Alexandre ******************* Hi Alexandre, I have heard that a cheap way to measure sand accumulation rates is to use 'sand traps'. These are plastic bottles of known volume placed level with the top of the sand. You can measure the rate of sand capture. ************* I don't know too much about it myself, but I have a few papers you could skim to get started. Zobeck is a good name to look up, as I believe he does a ton of that kind of work. Jason Field has also done a decent amount in an ecological context. I attached one from each. Best of luck! *************** Dear Alexandre: I worked on demography of an herbaceous plant on the dunes around Lake Michigan, for my thesis many years ago. I used small aluminum tags to mark my plants. The tags were cut from soft drink cans with "tin snips" and numbered using a set of dies that I pounded into the top tab. The tags had a top tab region (numbered) which was bent at right angles to the main pointed "stem". The stem was also bent into an angle of about 90 degrees long the vertical axis, to give it more strength as it was inserted into the ground. I found that, if I placed this tag at my plants with the bent "flap" right against the sand surface, that when I returned, months later, I could excavate the tag (which was marked by the presence of the plant that had continued to grow up through the accumulating sand). I could then measure the distance below the surface and determine how much sand deposition had occurred at the base of the plant in that interval. In my case, much of the sand deposition was due to ice along the edges of the lake, pushing sand up during the winter. I suppose if the dynamic is mostly deflation, this might not work very well. Good luck. Dr. Alexandre F. Souza Departamento de Botânica, Ecologia e Zoologia Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) http://www.docente.ufrn.br/alexsouza CurrÃculo Lattes: lattes.cnpq.br/7844758818522706
