Strategic planting and nutrient amendments to accelerate the revegetation of rapidly retreating coastal dunes

The increasing frequency and severity of disturbances to coastal dune ecosystems necessitates the development and implementation of restoration strategies that rapidly accelerate reestablishment of vegetation, enhance dune accretion, and ultimately preserve dune ecosystem services. To assess how to rapidly re-establish vegetation to counter ecosystem losses, we conducted a manipulative field experiment on a created dune in Northeast Florida, USA to determine what combinations of planting density, outplant species composition, and nutrient addition maximize dune revegetation rate. After three months, we found that increased planting densities combined with nutrient addition elevated aboveground plant biomass by 868-2,961%, while growth in sparsely planted and unfertilized treatments was negligible or negative. These thickly revegetated, high density + nutrient addition plots accreted 1-5 cm more sediment, demonstrating that this planting method can rapidly kickstart dune-building process..., Our field experiment was conducted on recently restored dunes located within the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTM-NERR) along the Florida A1A corridor (30° 1’ 20.8164” N, 81° 19’ 21.6732” W). The dune was constructed from May-June 2022 in a project led by St. Johns County using dredge sand sourced from nearshore deposits near the site (Figure 1). In late June 2022, we established 96 2.25 m2 plots along an elevation isocline on the crest of initially unvegetated restored foredunes. Plots were spaced 2 m apart to ensure independence and marked at the four corners with bamboo stakes inserted ~0.5 m deep into the sand.
We used a 2 × 2 × 3 factorial design with two levels of nutrient addition (ambient or fertilized), two levels of plant density (36 vs. 144 propagules per 2.25 m2; hereafter referred to as low vs. high), and three levels of plant diversity (monotypic sea oats, monotypic bitter panicum, 50/50 mixed bitter panicum and sea oats) (12 total treatment..., , # Strategic planting and nutrient amendments to accelerate the revegetation of rapidly retreating coastal dunes

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.pc866t208](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.pc866t208)

## Description of the data and file structure

This file is the primary dataset used for the various analyses described in our study, \"Strategic planting and nutrient amendments to accelerate the revegetation of rapidly retreating coastal dunes.\" We conducted a manipulative field experiment on a created coastal dune in Northeast Florida, USA to determine what combinations of planting density, outplant species composition, and nutrient addition maximized coastal dune revegetation rate and sand accretion.

### Files and variables

#### File: Morton\_et\_al.\_2024\_Rapid\_Dune\_Restoration\_data.xlsx

**Description:** This file contains all data from our dune planting experiment. The Above- and belowground biomass tab contains data on plot plant biomass metrics, the \"Abiotic metrics\" tab contains...