Sand dunes, like many ecosystems, have more than one comfort zone.
Sand dunes, like many ecosystems, have more than one comfort zone. Variations in moisture, especially, can shift them from active, blowing waves of dry sand to rolling mounds with soils held down by grass and low shrubs.
But those changes are not always smooth and uniform, and new research on dunes in China describes how even neighboring dunes can long remain in different and seemingly conflicting states — confounding the assessment of stabilization efforts and masking the effects of climate change.
For more than 15 years, University of Wisconsin–Madison geography professor Joe Mason and researchers at Nanjing University, China, have worked to date layers of sand and soils at dune sites across more than 1,000 kilometers in northern China. They compared their results to records of temperature and rainfall. Working with ecologists who have studied other dryland ecosystems, they published their analysis of 144 study sites today in the journal Science Advances.
“At each site we can reconstruct times when the dunes were active and bare at that location and when they were vegetation-stabilized,” says Mason. “We can show that there was this kind of patchwork of active and stable sand going back over the past 12,000 years.”
Read more at University of Wisconsin-Madison
Photo credit: Peggychoucair via Pixabay
